Hiring and Training Employees – What You Need to Know
The information provided below is for informational purposes only, is not intended to be construed as legal or any other type of professional advice or guidance and may not be accurate or suitable for your specific situation.
*Before you hire your first employees, make sure that you have the infrastructure in place to handle them. For example, you need to register as an employer with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and have a payroll system in place.
When you’re ready to start hiring, you need to set out a hiring process. This needs to meet all legal requirements and attract the attention of high-quality candidates. This hiring process generally consists of the following five stages:
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Creating a job description
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Turning a job description into a job advert
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Advertising your job
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Initial application screening and interviewing
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Final selection and job offer
Once your new recruit is on board, provide them with suitable employee training. Even if they have already done a similar job, they need to know what you specifically expect from them.
As a final point, set up a way to monitor and manage employee performance over the long term.*
Becoming an employer
Before you can take on your first employee, you need to register as an employer with the CRA. The easiest way to do this is to use Business Registration online. If you wish, you could also fill in a paper form and return it by mail or fax, or call the CRA.
It also makes sense to invest in payroll software. This is much easier than managing payroll manually. It generally pays for itself in the time it saves, plus it vastly reduces the possibility of human error.
Finally, most small businesses are likely to benefit from registering with an agency that can guide you through the legalities of employment. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of ensuring that your business is always fully compliant with all relevant laws.
Realistically, however, it’s unlikely that the average small business employer has or wants an in-house team to handle this. That’s exactly why third-party agencies are so popular.
A note on recruitment agencies
When you start thinking seriously about taking on new employees, do some research on recruitment agencies. Find out which ones have a solid reputation in your local area or business sector. Then get some information on what services they offer and what fees they charge.
Doing this upfront can save you a lot of time later if you need to hire in a hurry or want temporary workers to help out e.g. at peak times.
Hiring a new employee
Even if you are in a hurry to get a new employee on board as soon as possible, it’s still important to be thorough about the hiring process. If you really can’t wait to get an extra pair of hands on your team, consider bringing in an agency worker to help you out while you recruit.
Creating a job description
The first step in any hiring process is to work out what you need to be done, when and where. If there are any special requirements regarding how the work is to be done, define those too. This forms the basis of your job description.
Turning a job description into an advert
Most job adverts follow the same basic structure:
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Description of the job
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Description of the ideal employee
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Description of what you as the employer offer.
You already have a description of the job. Therefore focus on your description of your ideal employee and your description of what you can offer them.
Describing your ideal employee
Your ideal employee needs to be described in objective terms. Describe their qualifications, skills, experience and personal attributes (e.g. patience).
Be very clear about what is essential and what is desirable. As a rule of thumb, the more challenging it is to acquire a qualification or skill, the more you should lean towards listing it as essential.
By contrast, the easier it is to learn a qualification or skill, the more you can lean towards listing it as desirable. This can open the door to candidates who don’t have the qualification or skill but who could feasibly learn it through employee training.
Describing what you offer your employee
Give potential employees at least some idea of the compensation and benefits you are offering. If the salary or wage is negotiable, state the sort of room you have to negotiate. This helps to ensure that you only get applications from job seekers who are on the same page as you with regard to pay and benefits.
Remember that the opportunity to take part in a reputable training program can be a serious attraction for potential employees. If you’re prepared to invest in on-the-job training and employee development, definitely highlight this in your job advert.
As a final point, give potential employees an idea of what they can expect from your workplace itself. What makes it a nice place to work? Even little details can be selling points. For example, if you bring in coffee and pastries on a Friday, mention it.
Advertising your job
Your strategy for advertising your job often depends on how much time you have to recruit a new employee. Ideally, advertise your position initially through a job posting on your brand’s own channels, such as your website and your social media platforms.
The obvious social media platform to use is LinkedIn, but others can get good results too. This approach means that the first people to see your advert are people who already have some level of interest in your brand or at least your niche.
If you’re short on time, advertise the role on other channels as well. In fact, if you’re really in a hurry, reach out to at least one employment agency too.
Initial application screening and interviewing
Depending on how many responses you get, you may need to do multiple rounds of screening. Start by filtering out any candidates who are clearly unsuitable. Then carry on filtering out the weakest candidates, until you’re left with a shortlist of strong candidates you can feasibly interview in the time available.
If you are hiring for an on-site or hybrid position, you may want to do some initial interviews by video call. Then bring in the final candidates for a face-to-face interview. If you’re hiring for a remote position, it’s standard for the interview process to be fully remote.
If you’re new to hiring employees, you may want to have a third-party specialist to work with you to create your hiring process. You need to be confident that it is demonstrably fair to all applicants. This particularly includes those with protected characteristics.
It can be very easy for inexperienced employers to practise unintended discrimination. At best, this can result in employers losing potentially great employees. At worst, it can result in legal action or serious reputational damage.
Final selection and job offer
Once you have made your final selection, send out a job offer. In the old days, this meant sending out a job offer letter in the mail. These days it’s perfectly acceptable to send out an offer letter and an employment contract as email attachments.
Remember that not everybody has a printer or easy access to one, so you may need to send out a paper form or accept an electronic signature.
Organizing employee training
Your approach to employee training depends partly on the employee, partly on the role and partly on the frequency with which you expect to recruit for the role.
If you are simply hiring individual employees on an ad hoc basis, you can also arrange employee training on an ad hoc basis. You know the qualifications, skills and experience the employee already has. So simply provide employee training as necessary to fill in any gaps.
On the other hand, if you plan to hire regularly for the position, it can make sense to create a standardized training program. The time needed to create a robust training program can often be more than justified by the time it saves when onboarding new hires. This means that having a standardized training program can also help to save you money by getting new hires up to speed more quickly.
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