How to Hire a New Employee
Hiring your first team member can feel intimidating. You’re inviting someone into something you built and trusting them with the business you’ve put a lot of heart and passion into.
At the same time, staying in survival mode is not a long-term strategy. If you’re missing meetings, double booking your calendar, dropping balls, or operating on fumes, those are signals that your business has outgrown what one person can hold.
A strong first hire decision starts with clarity. You need to know what you want to hand off, what success looks like in the role, and how you will set this person up to win. When you intentionally hire and strategically onboard a new employee, you’ll get time back, reduce chaos, and create room to focus on growth, revenue, and leadership.
Key takeaways
This post helps CEOs and leaders learn how to hire well, especially if it’s your first new hire, and create a clear delegation strategy for a successful experience:
Most CEOs are ready for their first hire when the business has grown beyond what one person can manage without constant stress.
Signs you’re ready to hire: missed meetings, things falling through the cracks, a persistent feeling of being on the edge of burnout.
The first step when hiring a new employee is to make a list of tasks that drain time and energy, so you can define the role and write a clearer job description.
Avoid panic hiring by giving yourself time to evaluate candidates and define what success looks like.
Once you hire, delegate low-risk tasks first and be clear about the outcomes you want.
Create an onboarding process that includes your mission, vision, core values, training resources, and consistent check-ins.
Build feedback loops early, encourage questions, and assign ownership for documenting SOPs so work becomes repeatable.
How do I know it’s time to hire a new employee?
Many CEOs wait too long to make their first hire because they tell themselves they can handle it. In reality, ignoring the signals usually leads to survival mode.
Common signs you’re a CEO or leader who is ready to hire:
You miss meetings or show up unprepared because you’re juggling too much.
You double-book yourself or constantly reschedule.
Important details fall through the cracks.
You feel like you’re running on fumes and creeping toward burnout.
You can’t find time to work on growth because you’re trapped in day-to-day operations.
Use the bucket model to understand business growth
Look at your business as a series of buckets you are responsible for carrying.
In the beginning stages, your business probably had around a handful of buckets for you to manage:
Client work
Marketing
Sales
Operations
Admin
Finances
Those buckets were small enough that you could carry them all at once. But as your business grows, each of those buckets continues to get bigger and heavier.
When you realize you can’t keep up, it’s not a problem with your capacity or productivity. You’re simply trying to carry more than is physically possible.
If you were responsible for physically moving the “buckets” of your business every day, and you reached a point where you no longer could move all of the buckets… what would you do?
You would hire someone to help you!
When you look at your buckets right now, if there’s enough consistent work for a part-time or fractional role, there’s likely enough to hand off and enough revenue to support a new hire.
Want to hire a new employee? Start with a job description
You need to have clarity about what you want to stop doing, so you can understand what you need a new hire to take on in their role.
The first step in hiring well? Creating a “stop” list.
Your “stop” list should include:
Repetitive tasks that don’t require your expertise.
Work that drains your energy or feels like a constant drag.
Tasks that pull you away from revenue-generating activities.
Responsibilities you do simply because you’ve always done them.
This list will become the foundation of your first hire’s job description. It will also help you identify the type of hire you need to make.
For one business owner, the next best hire might be marketing support. For another, it might be operations, systems, or executive assistant support. Your goal is to choose the hire that will create the most immediate relief and the most meaningful progress.
Along with the stop list, make sure to define what success looks like in the role. Candidates want to know how they will be evaluated. Knowing how you’ll measure success now will help you lead your new hire better from day one.
What are the biggest mistakes CEOs make when hiring their first person?
The most common mistake is hiring in panic mode.
That usually looks like:
Waiting until you feel like you are drowning
Rushing the process and choosing quickly
Making emotional decisions about who to hire and what to pay
Skipping referrals, references, or thorough evaluation steps
Writing a vague job description because you are too exhausted to think strategically
Hiring too late often leads to short-term relief and long-term problems. If you hire before you reach emergency levels of overwhelm, you give yourself time to evaluate fit, assess skill, and find someone aligned with how you work.
Another mistake is hiring for likability instead of capability. You want a kind human, but you also need someone who can do the work. Hiring someone you would enjoy having coffee with is not the same as hiring someone who can confidently own the responsibilities you need to hand off.
A strong first hire should leave you thinking, “I can pass these key areas over and trust they will be handled well.”
Pro tips to follow when you hire a new employee
Making your first hire is a big milestone! Preparing well for this hire will make sure you and your new employee have a positive experience, and it will build your confidence for hiring and continuing to expand your team in the future.
Hiring is never perfect. Try not to expect too much from yourself or your new hire. Remember that your responsibility is to clearly communicate and make it easy for the new employee to succeed. It may take each of you some time to figure things out and get up to speed. That’s just part of the process!
Let’s look at some of the most common questions we get from CEOs who are preparing to make their first hire and share our professional advice and experience.
What should I delegate first after I make the hire?
Start with low-risk tasks that create immediate time back.
Some helpful things to delegate to your first hire include things like:
Calendar management and scheduling
Inbox management
Meeting coordination and follow-ups
Basic content scheduling or support
Admin tasks that repeat weekly
These tasks tend to be low financial risks and easier to hand off quickly. They also give both of you early wins. Your new hire gets momentum and confidence, and you feel relief quickly.
As you delegate, remember that your hire is learning your business, not just the task. Even if they’ve done similar work before, they haven’t done it in this specific context. Give them tasks they can take on while they’re still absorbing how you operate, who your key people are, and what your standards look like.
How do I delegate so my new hire gets it right?
Effective delegation requires precise, accurate communication. When communicating with your first hire, be clear about what needs to be done and what the expected outcomes are.
A task without context can be interpreted in many ways. This can lead to unmet expectations on your end and a frustrating experience for your new employee, who thinks they are doing the right thing.
Saying “clear my calendar” is unclear. Someone could cancel everything when what you really want is to remove meetings that are non-urgent or not tied to revenue.
The same issue shows up in nearly every business task. If you want a specific result, describe that result.
A simple approach that helps:
Explain what “done” looks like.
Share priorities and constraints, like budget, deadlines, and non-negotiables.
Provide examples of what good looks like.
Invite a first draft or first attempt, then give feedback quickly.
If you struggle to describe what you want, name that upfront. You can say, “I’m still figuring out how to explain this clearly, so I want you to take a first pass, and then we will refine it together.”
Using an open, collaborative tone reduces anxiety and creates a healthy feedback loop.
Onboarding your first new hire
Onboarding sets the tone for everything. A strong onboarding process reduces confusion, prevents gaps, and builds confidence early.
A solid onboarding plan includes:
Mission, vision, and core values
Clear role expectations and what success looks like
Logins and access to tools
Training resources, recordings, and SOPs
A checklist or welcome packet that guides their first days
Regular check-ins during the first 30, 60, and 90 days
Use a project management tool to make onboarding repeatable. (We love ClickUp!)
When onboarding lives as a template, you can improve it over time and reuse it for future hires.
Onboarding is an opportunity to build “fresh eyes” into your process. Invite new hires to flag anything they experience that’s confusing or outdated.
As your business changes, onboarding documentation can fall behind. Soliciting feedback from a new hire helps you keep it current.
How do I delegate without micromanaging?
The whole point of delegating is to take work off your plate.
If you must continue to be involved in every detail of a task you delegated… you haven’t effectively delegated anything at all.
The key to delegating without micromanaging is being clear.
Clarity reduces assumptions, rework, extra costs, and confusion. It also protects your time and your team’s time.
Clarity means shared understanding. It includes:
Defining what success looks like
Giving context so decisions are easier
Providing detailed feedback that explains what needs to change and why
Encouraging questions early and often
If feedback is too generic, your team can’t improve.
“I don’t like this,” isn’t actionable. Specific feedback like “The font needs to change,” or “This needs to be shorter and more direct,” gives your hire a path forward.
Encourage questions as a sign of engagement. If someone asks thoughtful questions after trying to find the answer, that usually means they care about doing the work well. Set preferences for how questions should be shared, like saving them for a weekly meeting or sending them in a message thread.
You should also assign ownership for documenting SOPs.
If a process lives in your head, your team can’t consistently repeat it without coming to you every time. Your new hire can build the SOP as they learn the task, including screenshots, steps, and quick Loom recordings. This documentation will help build confidence and support long-term quality.
What happens when you hire a new employee the right way
When you can make a successful first hire, it gives you back time and reduces the daily friction that keeps you stuck.
Hiring well and delegating like a pro makes it possible for you to:
Focus on revenue-generating work
Lead more strategically
Protect your energy and reduce burnout risk
Improve systems and build repeatable processes
Create a clearer culture of communication and accountability
Hiring isn’t just about getting tasks off your plate. You want to build a business that can grow beyond your personal capacity, and that’s not possible without hiring.
When you hire with clarity and train with intention, your first hire becomes the foundation for a stronger team and a healthier business, growing business.
Your next steps
If you’ve enjoyed learning about how to make your first hire and delegate your first tasks, we’ve got more free resources and podcast episodes you’ll love!
Download the free Tools to Let Go and Level Up Workbook
This guided workbook takes what we shared in this post and shows you how to take specific action steps to implement what you learn.Subscribe and listen to The Delegation Download Podcast on Apple or Spotify.
This post was inspired by Episode 2 of the Series –– The Delegation Shift: Let Go to Level Up.
