How to hire your first employee in New Zealand: Tools and Tips

How to hire your first employee in New Zealand: Tools and Tips

So you’ve grown your business enough to have too much work to handle or not quite the right skills in your team, it’s time to hire.

Here’s a list of our learnings of how to best hire your first employee and what to remember in the process.

Foster Diversity Early

Create the employee environment from the beginning:

We knew that we wanted to be a progressive, inclusive and employee focused business from the beginning, just like the companies who sign onto Dignity to supply our sanitary items to their female employees. Our employees would also get free sanitary items, regardless of their gender.

 

Use Artificial Intelligence:

One of the best tools we used during our hiring process was Textio, an artificial intelligence job listing tool that helps filter any bias you are unintentionally creating.

This may included gendered phrases or not including an equal opportunity employment statement, our job listing improved dramatically after using Textio for 15 minutes.

Choose the most Relevant Job Board

Pick One:

 

There are so many job boards out there with very different candidate markets. We knew that our social enterprise needed someone who was familiar with the sector and was keen to have a job that made a difference.

That made using Do Good Jobs a no brainer, talented, highly motivated people that like giving back were our target market and this job board made it simple and painless to do that.

Be Organised

Plan:

What is your timeframe for listing the job, shortlisting candidates, interviewing candidates and the potential start date?

Be accountable to these milestones. With these milestones be aware of what you need to undertake as a new employer, set yourself up with a payroll company early to avoid the panic once they start!

Key Dates Planner

  1. Job Listing Opens

  2. Job Listing Closes

  3. Email to applicants and shortlisted candidates

  4. Email unsuccessful shortlisted candidates and candidates to interview

  5. Interview Dates and Times

  6. Letter of Offer sent to Candidate

  7. Employee Start date

 

Interviews:

Choose interviews time earlier to block out your calendar, we used the awesome free software Calendly to get our candidates to choose their interview time - no more going back and forth. Our availability, their preferred time and the calendar invite were all organised with a few simple clicks.  

Induction:

We got a few handy hints from our friends at Summer of Tech on what to include in our induction pack, for our casual employee we have a pack that includes:

  • Letter of offer

  • Job description

  • Employment contract

  • IR330

  • Our strategic plan

  • Our Sign up sheet and terms

  • Our Information sheet

Make sure you actually have work planned out for them, organise your induction day early and have their work plan set out for the month.

Paperwork:

To help with all the paperwork use the MBIE Employment Builder to make a compliant and comprehensive agreement - being an employer is a huge responsibility.

And that’s it! This is by no means professional legal or business advice, just a blog that we wish we had come across before hiring our first employee.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and hiring tips! Did we miss anything? Let us know :) If you interested in working at Dignity drop us a line at hello@dignitynz.com with your CV.

 

Want to know more about Dignity’s wellbeing at work initiative, read more here.

Reading next

Is Dignity a charity?
Talks With Innovators, Creatives & Enterprisers [TWICE]: Options For Women

Leave a comment

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.