How to Recruit Your First Employee: Advert, Shortlist, Interview

Why structure matters more for a first hire, not less

It is tempting to think that recruitment process is something larger businesses need and small ones can skip, relying instead on gut feel and a friendly chat. In practice, the opposite is true for a first hire. You have no existing team to absorb a poor decision, no HR function to catch a legal misstep, and no track record of what 'a good hire for us' actually looks like. Structure is not bureaucracy here; it is the thing that protects you from the single most expensive mistake a small business can make in its first year of employing people.

This guide assumes you have already done the work of designing the role properly — knowing what the job actually is, what success looks like, and what it is realistically going to cost. If you have not done that yet, it is worth going back a step before writing an advert, because no amount of interview technique will fix a role that was never properly defined.

Writing the advert

A good job advert is built directly from your one-page role brief, not written fresh in a burst of optimism. State clearly what the person will actually do day to day, using specific, concrete language rather than a list of adjectives like 'dynamic' or 'proactive' that describe nobody in particular. Candidates, and especially good ones, are put off by vague adverts because they cannot tell whether the role suits them, and they read vagueness as a sign the founder has not thought the role through.

Include the salary or a genuine salary range. Adverts that withhold pay entirely tend to attract fewer strong applicants, because experienced candidates increasingly filter these out before applying, and it wastes both sides' time to reach the final stage before pay expectations are found to be incompatible. Be honest about the things that are genuinely true of working for a very small business — direct contact with the founder, less structure than a large company, more variety in the role — since these are meaningful selling points to the right candidate and off-putting to the wrong one, and clarity here saves you from mismatched applications either way.

• Base the advert on your one-page role brief, not a fresh wish list.
• Use specific, concrete language about actual day-to-day tasks rather than generic adjectives.
• State the salary or a genuine range rather than 'competitive' or nothing at all.
• Be honest about what working at a very small business is genuinely like, both the upsides and the trade-offs.
• List only the requirements that are genuinely necessary, not a wish list that will exclude good candidates.

Setting shortlisting criteria before you read applications

Before you open a single application, write down the three to five criteria that actually matter for this role, drawn from your role brief, and decide roughly how you will weigh them. This matters because reading applications without pre-agreed criteria makes it very easy to be swayed by whoever writes the most engaging covering letter, rather than whoever is genuinely best matched to the role's real requirements. It also gives you a defensible, consistent basis for your decisions if a rejected candidate ever queries the process.

Score every application against the same criteria using the same scale, even if you are the only person reviewing them. This sounds like unnecessary formality for a business of one or two people, but it is precisely the discipline that stops a strong personal impression from one candidate overriding a stronger practical fit from another whose application was simply less polished.

Running a structured interview

A structured interview means deciding your core questions in advance and asking the same ones, in broadly the same way, to every candidate for the role. This is not about removing all spontaneity from the conversation; follow-up questions specific to what a candidate says are entirely appropriate. It is about ensuring that every candidate has a fair, comparable chance to demonstrate the things that actually matter for the role, rather than the interview drifting into whatever topics happen to come up.

Build your questions around the real requirements of the role: ask candidates to describe how they have handled a specific type of situation relevant to the job, rather than only asking hypothetical or generic questions. Where practical, a short, realistic work sample task — for example, drafting a sample customer reply, or working through a short scenario relevant to the role — tells you far more about likely on-the-job performance than a conversation alone, and gives quieter or less polished interviewees a fairer chance to show their actual ability.

Take notes during or immediately after each interview while the details are fresh, scored against the same criteria you used for shortlisting. This protects you from the natural tendency to remember the most recent or most charismatic candidate most favourably, regardless of how they actually performed against the criteria that matter.

1. Prepare 6–8 core questions drawn from the real requirements of the role, used for every candidate.
2. Decide in advance whether and how a short work-sample task will be used.
3. Take structured notes during or immediately after each interview.
4. Score every candidate against the same criteria you used for shortlisting.
5. Check references and right-to-work documentation before making a final offer.

The legal basics that apply from your very first hire

Discrimination law under the Equality Act applies to job adverts and interviews from your first hire, not once you reach a certain size. This means avoiding questions or requirements that indirectly or directly discriminate against protected characteristics, such as asking about plans to have children, assuming availability based on someone's age, or specifying requirements that are not genuinely necessary for the role and happen to disadvantage a particular group. Acas publishes clear, practical guidance on what this means for recruitment, and it is worth reading before you write your advert, not after a candidate raises a concern.

A right-to-work check is a legal requirement for every employee before they start work, regardless of the size of your business, and there are specific, government-approved methods for carrying it out and retaining evidence of it. This is not a step you can skip for someone who seems obviously eligible; the check itself, done correctly and recorded, is what protects you, not your personal judgement about the individual.

Right-to-work checks are a legal requirement for every hire, done through the approved method, before their first day.

Making the offer and closing the loop

Once you have decided, make the offer promptly and in writing, including the key terms: salary, hours, start date and any conditions such as satisfactory references or right-to-work checks. Good candidates who are strung along by a slow, informal offer process sometimes accept another role in the meantime, so it is worth having your offer letter template ready before you reach this stage rather than drafting it under time pressure.

It is also worth closing the loop properly with candidates you do not choose, particularly anyone who reached the interview stage. A brief, courteous message maintains your reputation in a small local labour market, which matters more for a small business than it might seem, since word travels quickly about how candidates were treated.