After taking care of the administrative and legal procedures, the next tip on how to start a business is hiring employees to support your business.  Hiring employees is not a simple task, since they play key roles in determining whether the business will be a failure or a success. Failure to recruit competent staffs will make you end up with hiring people who cannot perform their tasks and duties or people who cannot work in team.

How to Start a Business: Recruiting the Staffs

To make sure that the applicants fit the available positions in your company and to get competent staffs to be in your team, the following are some tips on how to start a business by hiring the right staffs:

Doing a Comprehensive Check

When analyzing the applicants’ document or when interviewing the candidates, doing a comprehensive check for their backgrounds is necessary. The reference checks may include the following items:

• Educational degrees
• Previous job titles, roles, and responsibilities
• Previous salary
• Reasons for the applicants to leave the prior job
• Talking to the applicant’s prior supervisor to find out his/her strengths and weaknesses
• Applicants’ willingness and ability to work with other people in the company
• Absenteeism and disciplinary issues

• Environment checks, if necessary

Drafting Offer Letter Carefully

If you want to hire prospective employees, make sure to use carefully drafted offer letters. Oral agreements are not powerful enough to ‘tie’ the employees. Make the employee agreement as detailed as possible and ask them to read it carefully before signing the contract. A good employment agreement or offer letter includes at least the following items:

• Job title, roles, and responsibilities
• Fulltime vs part-time employment
• Job commencement
• Salary, allowances, benefits, and potential bonus
• Requirements for job termination (e.g. resignation)
• Conditions for the modification of the agreement
• Agreement to sign Confidentiality and Invention Assignment Agreement
• How disputes will be addressed
• Employees’ supervisors

Then, make sure that the employment agreement is signed by both the employee and you, as the employer. Give a copy for the employees and another one for the company.

Confidentiality and Invention Assignment Agreement (CIAA)

This is a separate agreement to be signed by the prospective employees. This is important to protect both the company and the employees. You pay them to come up with creative ideas, making products, discoveries, studies, and inventing new things that may be useful for the business. They also have access to confidential information about the company. So, make sure to protect the proprietary company information by having the prospective staffs sign the CIAA.

The agreement regulates what the employees can do and what they cannot do. For instance, it states that what the employees invent and create in relation to their jobs and positions belong to the company, not the employees as individuals. Therefore, when they exit the job, they cannot claim rights for the inventions.  CIAA also prohibits the employees to disclose any confidential information about the company.

The third tip on how to start a business by making a signed agreement with the prospective employees is actually a step to protect intellectual properties in your business. Keep reading on detailed discussion on how to protect your intellectual properties in the next posts.