Your first hire

You've got more work than you can handle alone — which is a good problem, until it turns into the wrong hire, a classification mistake, or a first month spent guessing instead of working. Your First Hire walks you through the decisions that actually matter before you bring someone on: whether you need an employee or a contractor (and why that question comes before everything else), whether you need to hire at all, how to write a job description that attracts the right person, how to interview without overengineering it, and how to onboard someone so they're useful in week one instead of month three.

This book is honest about where general advice ends. Worker classification and hiring paperwork carry real legal weight and vary by state — so instead of pretending to hand you a template, this book tells you exactly what to ask a professional and when, so the one call that needs an expert gets one, and everything else you can just get on with.

Inside, you'll learn how to:

• Understand the employee vs. contractor question before it becomes a costly mistake

• Decide whether hiring is actually the right fix for your workload

• Write a job description that filters candidates accurately, not just attracts more of them

• Run a simple, consistent interview process built for a small team

• Set up a first-week plan that gets a new hire genuinely useful, fast

Part of the Business Basics That Work series: practical, no-fluff guides for freelancers, local shop owners, and small business owners who'd rather get it done than read a textbook.