Yayy! You’re hiring someone on your team!
But what are you supposed to give them on Day 1?
Do you share your passwords?
What agreements do you need to have ready?
Slow your roll, lady!
I’m going to walk you through some things.
Obviously the hiring process is super crucial, but it’s also important to make sure your team members are prepared and set up for success. I’m pretty sure you could name a time where you either took a new job and you felt like you were just sent out to the wolves with no lifelines.
I like to make my team feel welcome. Otherwise, I’m just asking them to fail, and then I have to redo the whole hiring process. And that equals hell.
So why not just start everybody off on the right foot?
First things first, I like to set up their email account with Google, and I personally use G Suite. Here’s my reasoning—every person on your team should have an email account because it makes things a lot easier, communication wise. They may not be talking to clients or have other outreach, but it makes things so much easier, especially with Google Drive. If they use their personal email, then all of your stuff is gonna be on their personal drive, which you can’t actually access. Using a company email address also makes it easier when they leave – for good or bad reasons. And if they leave, you can toggle their account off if necessary, and you can still go through all of their emails and drives, and you have access and ownership of all that stuff. If you rely on personal email addresses, you don’t have access to team members’ stuff when they leave, which is bananas to me.
Next, send them logins through LastPass, which is a password organizer. So I have certain folders for different social media or client stuff and that way when I onboard people, I just toggle on access to my social media for my social media gals, or podcast stuff, it just makes it so easy when you have new people coming in and out of your team.
Also, prepare initial projects before your new team member starts on the first day, so they know what they’re doing on the first day and in the first week. It’s important to have this ready, otherwise, it’s very uncomfortable for them to come on the team and not know their place. And I think we’ve all been there.
So maybe for your social media person, you have them go through your blog posts and make captions for all of those first, or for your events/PR person, you have them draft an email to three people for your podcast.
Whatever the project is, just make sure you have it ready for them.
Another thing you can do is film video tutorials for them of how you have done their new responsibilities previously or what you would like for them to start doing.
This is super overlooked and depending on who you are hiring, they may already be aware of how to use certain software but they maybe have used a different type of software and so I always film video tutorials of how things are done because I want things done the way I want them done and the only way that I can ensure that is for me to lay it out step by step. And also resend them the official job description to walk them through actual examples of what you want in your business. I’ve done this in the hiring process, but there’s never too many times you can go over this because you really want to set up the correct expectations for this person in this position.
Send a contract with an NDA and a non-compete if you choose along with a W9 for tax purposes, so if it’s an employee, it’s actually a W2, but for freelancers and contractors it’s actually going to be a W9. Honestly, I don’t have everybody on my team sign an NDA and a non-compete, some things I don’t care about, but if you decide to get them to sign a non-compete, that’s totally up to you, I’m not a lawyer.
Lastly, your call to action is to create a welcome pack checklist, where you compile all of these things, so they’re readily available and you’re ready to go!
