When your business embarks on a period of growth and expansion, staffing and recruitment can be among the most uncomfortable “growing pain” points. You’re trying to focus on pushing your business to a new level, yet you need to prepare to hand over tasks and responsibilities to a new hire. You know that “I’ll just keep doing everything myself” is no longer the answer, but it’s challenging to find the right talent and let go of your traditional role. Yet, by taking the right approach and using available tools, you can streamline the process and land the right talent.

The keys include:

• Defining your needs, building positions. Consider the best strategies for expanding the team, including hiring and outsourcing options. In determining position needs, avoid thinking in terms of tasks rather than goals. Use available tools and resources to help benchmark salaries, build job descriptions, and more.
• Interviewing, screening, and selection. By the time you reach the in-person interview stage, you should be speaking with people who have already cleared the make-or-break hurdles—now it’s a question of culture fit and personality—theirs, and just as important, yours. Lay out a three-month schedule for handing the work fully over to the new hire.
• Using all the resources you can. Whether you’re assessing your organizational needs, recruiting, building job descriptions, assessing the fit of candidates with your organization, or pre-interviewing/interviewing, there are a wide range of online tools and resources to aid you in your search.

While staffing is a time-consuming task, it’s a critical part of putting your company on a path to growth from the start. Putting the right processes in place and using all the resources available can help you find the people that match your vision, plans, and culture.

Read the first in our series of Connections to Growth: Team guides, Putting the Right Team in Place, to learn how hiring the right people can spur your business’s growth.