E-Commerce Recruiting: When You Should Hire Your First Employee

Many online shops start as a one-person show and then slowly develop into an empire, but when should solo online retailers start thinking about hiring more people, and who should they hire?

When is the right time to hire your first employee?

If you start employee hiring too early, you might incur financial problems. If you hire your first employee too late, you might find yourself in a bind. And sales could come to a standstill as a result. It's a difficult situation, indeed.

Online retailers who have started their online shop on their own are used to being self-sufficient, be it designing, marketing, shipping, support and everything else that goes with it.

At some point, however, everyone reaches their limit. That is when it is time to make a decision: burn out or delegate some of your tasks?

The answer should be straightforward (Hint: don't burn out!).

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are online retailers who want to outsource as much as possible as early as possible.

As with everything in life, there is no one hundred percent correct answer. However, these two extremes are not recommended, because online retailers should...

...at least have an idea of how everything works at an online shop and have an all-round expertise, and...
...be able to delegate tasks and responsibilities so that their shop can continue to grow.

Whether it is the right time to hire someone to support the shop or not is seldom the only question to answer. As soon as an online retailer starts thinking about hiring their first employee, even more questions soon follow:

What if I hire the wrong person? What if they are incompetent? What if they decide to resign after a short time? What if I'm a bad boss? Do I really need help?

You should just accept that there is no perfect time to hire your first employee.

However, according to Neil Patel, there are situations in which it is advisable not to increase your team’s size: if you do so out of despair, for instance.

Hiring a new employee is often stressful. There are tasks that you simply can no longer deal with by yourself and a competent employee would be a real godsend. However, hiring an employee too quickly just out of necessity is, in most cases, not a good decision.

Here are some typical mistakes you might make:

You haven’t defined the job description clearly. You realise that you need help, but you don't exactly know what for. Therefore, make sure you identify and define precisely which tasks you need support for.

You hire the very first applicant. With some luck, the first applicant may well be a real genius and can quickly help you boost your sales. This is usually the exception, though – not the rule. So, take your time and interview several candidates to make sure you hire the right person.

What it all comes down to

Basically, employees should be doing one of the following two things: they should either make you money or save you money.

If you are convinced that an employee can perform one of these two tasks, you can hire them with peace of mind.

At the beginning of your online career, the focus is on making money. After all, if you don't make money, you can't really save money. Once you have a decent positive cash flow, you may want to hire an employee to make sure that less money is lost or that the money you have is used more sensibly.

Be prepared when hiring a new employee

Shutterstock.com/fizkes

The right time is as soon as you have clearly defined the tasks that you want the new employee to take on and your online shop has the potential to increase sales.

The more precisely you can describe the new hire’s tasks, the sooner you will find the right person for your online shop.

Instead of looking for a “web designer for an online shop”, you should go into more detail with your job ad:

We are looking for support in the area of web design for the online shop demoshop.com. You should have experience with Wordpress and WooCommerce. Advanced knowledge of HTML and Python is a requirement (...).

Once you have defined your requirements and believe that a new employee would really have a positive impact on your shop, you can start searching.

Who should you hire?

Once a new position is created, it only needs to be filled. However, this often turns out to be a complicated task.

Have their tasks been clearly defined? Are they sufficiently skilled for the job? Should it be a full-time or a part-time job? Does the applicant fit my shop and the culture I want to build?

All these questions need to be answered.

Tip: To check whether a new employee would really make sense for your online shop, try hiring a freelancer who will (partially) take over the tasks you would like to delegate for a while.

It could be on an hourly or a project basis, depending on the job you want to test. This is the best way to answer the questions above because you'll get an idea of what the position would look like and you can get used to dealing with applicants as well.

If the position does prove useful, you can start looking for a person to hire on a permanent contract. Firstly, you may want to check out the most well-known job portals, such as Stepstone, Monster, or LinkedIn.

Marco Garbrecht, Head of Recruiting at Trusted Shops GmbH, has two more tips for you, though:

Facebook groups! Be it for SEO, design, Google Ads, or e-mail marketing, there's always at least one good Facebook group for every sector that experts use to exchange views. If you want to get a feel for the job, the people, and the area of expertise, you should definitely join such groups. Don't be afraid to ask questions, like:

“What do I need to know if I want to hire someone in this sector?”
Meet-ups! Regular events where experts meet up are organised in every major city. Here, too, you can gain new insights and ask questions. You can find the right event with the search query “Specialty/Industry City Meetup”, like the Wordpress London Meetup.