How to Hire and OnBoard An Employee at a new Start-Up

Get a lawyer to draft an employment agreement. This will save you troubles 100% of the time, and is the #1 recommendation of employment law practitioners everywhere. They deal with the nasty stuff when it goes sideways, so I trust this advice.

Onboarding is the process of getting an employee set-up to work productively. This is the paperwork, legal stuff, and job orientation that each new person needs before they can actually start producing work.

This could be as simple as filling out the basic paperwork, and then setting up a peer-to-peer job shadow for the first few days. Scale it to your needs, but do something to show your hires that you are excited to have them on the team. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

If you have fewer than 50 employees and no dedicated HR staff, you can and should outsource your onboarding to an HR consultant, HR firm, or use SaaS products. For example, services like Collage HR offer Employee Self-Onboarding to collect employee and tax info, auto enrol them in benefits and assign training all online and before their first day.

There are other SaaS companies like Trajectory IQ that have gamefied the onboarding process. If your company is big enough, this kind of onboarding may reflect the right tone of your company or brand.

For more in the series on The Absolute Minimum a Start-Up CEO Needs to Know About HR

1. How To Find Good Candidates to Hire

2. How to Hire and OnBoard An Employee

3. How to Motivate, Incentivize and Manage The Performance Of An Employee

4. How to Foster Healthy Company Culture and Avoid Conflict that Will Cause Your Company To Fail

5. How to Fire An Underperforming Employee