How long does hiring take?

Four to eight weeks from deciding to hire to somebody starting, for most small teams. Roughly a week to define and write the role, two to three weeks of the advert being live, one to two weeks of interviewing, then a notice period that is commonly a month. The step people underestimate is their own response time: a shortlist sitting unread for ten days is the most common reason a good candidate takes another offer.

What does it cost to hire someone?

The advert can be free. The real costs are the hours you spend, the time the role sits open, and whatever you pay to reach candidates if free channels do not fill it. For a small team the largest hidden cost is usually the vacancy itself, which is why moving quickly is worth more than optimising the process.

Should I hire an employee or a contractor?

It depends on control and permanence, and the distinction is a legal one in most countries, not a preference. If you direct how and when the work happens and the arrangement is ongoing, it is usually employment. Getting this wrong carries real penalties, so check your jurisdiction's test rather than copying what another business does.

Do I need a recruiter?

For most first and second hires, no. Recruiters earn their fee on hard-to-fill or senior roles where reaching passive candidates matters. For a role with a reasonable applicant pool, a clear advert in the right places plus a week of your attention does the same job at no cost.

What paperwork do I need before someone starts?

It varies by country and often by state, and it is genuinely worth getting right: registrations, tax and payroll setup, right-to-work checks, a written contract, insurance. Payroll providers publish good jurisdiction-specific checklists and this guide deliberately does not, because the wrong answer here is expensive.

How many applications should I expect?

For a general role advertised on a large board, dozens to hundreds. For a specialist one, a handful. Both are normal, and both catch people out: the first makes reading everything impossible, the second makes waiting feel like failure when the answer is to go to where those candidates actually are.

What is the most common mistake?

Writing the advert for yourself rather than the candidate. The second is being slow: the best applicants are usually in more than one process, and the one that replies on Tuesday beats the one that replies the following week.

How to hire employees: the whole process, step by step

Hiring is five decisions and a lot of waiting. Decide what the role actually is, decide what it pays, write an advert somebody would answer, put it where that person looks, and get through the replies fast enough that good people are still available. Everything else is detail.

This is the order to do it in, and what usually goes wrong at each step.

Step 1: Decide what the job is, not what the title is

Write down what this person will do in their first three months. If you cannot fill half a page, the role is not defined enough to hire for and you will end up interviewing against a moving target.

The useful test is the alternative: if you could not hire anybody, what would you stop doing? That is the job.

Then pick a title people search for rather than the internal grade. Our job description templates cover the common roles, and the guide to writing a job description explains what to change in them.

Step 2: Work out what it pays before you advertise

Decide the range first, because everything downstream depends on it. Look at what comparable roles in your area and industry are advertising, not at what you paid last time.

Publish it. Several US states and EU rules now require pay ranges in adverts, and it is the single most effective filter you have: it removes the applications that were never going to accept your offer, before you read them.

If the range is below market, you are not hiring at that price and it is better to find out now than after three weeks of silence.

Most organisations already have a job description in the HR sense, full of duties and reporting lines. Publishing it as the advert is the most common mistake in hiring.

Open with what the person does, not with your founding story. Keep the must-have list genuinely short, because every item filters and some filter unevenly. Say what it pays, where it is, and how to apply.

Step 4: Put it where the right person will actually look

Free channels first, because they work more often than people expect. The large boards take free posts, narrow boards reach a self-selected audience, and communities you already belong to reach people who are not looking but would move.

The channel everybody forgets is their own site. A careers page with the right structured data is eligible to appear in Google’s job results, permanently, at no cost per role. Where to post a job for free goes through what each free option actually asks for in return.

Post to two or three places and point them all back at the listing you own.

Step 5: Get through the applications quickly

This is where small teams lose their best candidates. The applications arrive, everyone is busy, and by the time somebody reads them properly the strongest people have accepted something else.

Two things fix it. Decide in advance who reads them and when, and put it in the calendar. And if the pile is large, rank it rather than skimming it: skimming has all the biases of a scoring tool and none of the record. AI resume screening covers what that does well and where it fails.

Reply to everyone, including the no. It costs ten minutes and it is the part of your hiring that candidates talk about.

Step 6: Interview against the job, not against a feeling

Ask every candidate the same core questions, in the same order, and write down the answers as you go. Unstructured interviews mostly measure how comfortable somebody is in an interview, which is rarely the job.

Two rounds is enough for most roles. A short task is fine if it is short, paid where that is appropriate, and genuinely representative. Long unpaid exercises lose you the candidates who have other options.

Step 7: Offer quickly, then do the paperwork properly

Make the offer by phone, confirm it in writing the same day, and be ready to move if they are in another process.

The paperwork is where this guide stops being useful. Registrations, payroll, tax, right-to-work checks, contracts and insurance vary by country and often by state, the penalties for getting them wrong are real, and payroll providers publish far better jurisdiction-specific checklists than we could. Use one.

Where hiring usually goes wrong

The role is vague, so the advert is vague and the shortlist is a mixture of people who cannot be compared.

The advert is about the company rather than the job, so it attracts people who want a job rather than this job.

The pay is hidden, so both sides discover the mismatch after three conversations.

Nobody reads the applications for a week, so the best ones are gone.

Only one channel is used, usually the biggest board, which produces volume and not fit.

Doing it on your own site

Everything above works whatever you use. If your site runs on WordPress, WP Career Board gives you the careers page free: roles published with the structured data Google reads, applications arriving in a dashboard rather than an inbox, and employer and candidate accounts so people manage their own submissions. When the replies outpace your reading, AI screening ranks them, and it can run on your own server so CVs never leave it.

Employment rules, pay transparency requirements and hiring paperwork vary by jurisdiction and change. This is a practical guide, not legal advice, and it was written in September 2026.

How to hire employees