It’s All About Timing

Timing is essential when it comes to hiring new employees especially for small start-up businesses. Employ too soon and it will have a dire effect on your profits and cash flow or wait too long and you will not be able to keep up with the business commitments, unfinished work will start to pile up and your company’s reputation may take a bad hit for being unreliable.

What factors to consider before deciding to start hiring:

1. One of the biggest factors that need to be considered is the business’s financial status. By examining the financial reports you can examine your company’s direction in accordance to how revenue has changed over time. If revenue has been steadily growing, it means that the business is experiencing growth whilst your current employees are working in an efficient manner. However this growth may also indicates that in order to continue with the same level of growth , you need to hire new workers.

• It is also vital for the management to understand the current employee capacity. This is best achieved by means of direct communication with the employees or their managers. If we conclude that the employees are either cannot take new work or worse that they are already overloaded with workload, it is a signal that the current workforce has reached their limit capacity and it is a signal to create new job opening to keep growing the business.

• Taking a look at how much overtime your employees are working and compare it over the span of several months is also a clear indicator of how the current workforce are managing their current workforce. Overtime can sometimes prove to be more costly than hiring a new employee whilst also considering that overtime will burnout the employees and decrease their efficiency.

• In a highly volatile environment, a business may be presented with new opportunities to offer new goods or services. In such scenarios one firstly need to look at their own employees and evaluate whether they can manage the additional workload. Should the employees have already reached their capacity limit, then we can start looking to hire new employees. We also need to consider whether new opportunities require added skills and experiences that our current employees do not possess.