You've hired before. That's not necessarily the problem.

The problem is what keeps happening after: the no-show on day two, the "experienced" referral who needed babysitting, the great interview who quit in month three.

If you're searching for how to hire employees for a small business, I'd bet it's not because you don't know how to post a job.

It's because posting a job keeps getting you the same unreliable results. And every failed hire costs you money, momentum, and results in having a little bit less faith in the people you’re trying to hire.

Here's an important reframe that changed how I hire: most likely you don't have a hiring problem, you have a process problem.

After 20+ years and 100+ hires at The Motley Fool, The Hustle, HubSpot, and Hampton, this is the system I'd run at any small business.

Six steps, from defining the role to making the offer.

The short version: hiring employees for a small business is six steps. Define the job as outcomes rather than duties, widen your applicant pool, filter with a required 3-minute video, run the same structured interview on everyone, test the actual work with a short paid sample, then check references before the paperwork.

There are three main failure points, and almost every bad outcome traces to one of them:

You're fishing from a tiny pond. One job post, one referral ask, and you pick from whoever shows up. A super small applicant pool means you are forced to compromise.

You have no true filter besides your time. Every applicant costs you a phone call to evaluate. So you evaluate ten, get exhausted, and exhaustion makes bad decisions.

You decide on gut feel. With no real structure, this person "seemed reliable" wins. And "seems reliable in a 30-minute chat" has almost nothing to do with "is reliable at 7am on a Tuesday" or “can actually do the work.”

The six steps below fix each of these in order: define, widen, filter, structure, test, verify.

Before posting anything, answer three things.

What specific outcomes will this person own? What does success look like in 90 days? What seniority does the work actually require?

That last one is where small businesses bleed money.

Owners default to hiring for the title that "sounds right," when the actual need is a dependable executor at a lower level. Or occasionally the reverse. Neither the fancy title nor the cheap hire fixes a mis-scoped role.

If you're making your very first hire, start here instead. The readiness math and the paperwork are their own topic.

You can't be selective from a pool of six applicants. Market for employees the way you market for customers:

More applicants doesn't mean more interviews, though. Because of what comes next.

This is the step that changes everything, and almost no small business does it.

Add one requirement to every application: "Record a 3-minute video introducing yourself. Tell us why you're excited about this role, and a few things we should know about you, professionally and personally."

What happens next is the magic. Most applicants (the lazy ones, the spray-and-pray ones, the ones who can't follow a simple instruction) never send the video. They filter themselves out at zero cost to you.

The videos you do get show you communication, initiative, energy, and preparation before you've spent a minute on anyone. Three minutes of video does more screening work than any question you'll ever ask in an interview.

If a candidate isn't excited enough to spend three minutes telling you why, they aren't excited enough. (Use that wording verbatim. It belongs in the “how to apply” section of your job post, which you’ll write in Step 3 of Start the Hire, free.)

Everyone who passes the video filter gets the same interview. Same questions, same order, scored as you go.

Ask for the past, not the hypothetical. "Tell me about the last time a job went sideways. What did you do?" is hard to fake. "How would you handle a problem?" is a creative-writing prompt.

Score each answer minus-2 to plus-2 on the two or three things that decide the role. I typically score every candidate on three things: communication, skillset, and fit. And require evidence for every score.

Before you hire, watch them do a small, paid sample of the real job.

I will create a very real project or assessment for every single role I hire for. It’ll take you a few hours to create, and that time is well worth it.

Keep it short (3-5 hours), pay them for their time, and watch how they handle instructions, questions, and imperfection. A few hours of watching someone work beats ten hours of talking about work.

It's also a two-way filter. The candidate learns what the job actually is, which is how you prevent the month-three surprise quit.

References. Three questions, every finalist: Would you hire them again? What environment do they struggle in? How's their reliability, specifically: attendance, deadlines, follow-through? Listen for hesitation. Polite-but-tepid is a no.

Paperwork. One afternoon: EIN from the IRS, state employer registration, workers' comp, payroll provider, I-9 and W-4 on day one. The SBA guide has state specifics.

Don't let this part intimidate you out of hiring. It's administrative, not strategic.

The most common objection: "the good ones cost more than I can pay."

And yes, sometimes that’s true. But often, it’s an excuse.

You're not competing with corporate employers on salary.

You're competing on everything they're bad at: real ownership instead of a cog-in-a-wheel role, direct access to the owner instead of three layers of management, flexibility big employers can't match, and real skills that actually compound.

Good people leave bigger paychecks for those things every day. But only if you sell them, explicitly, in the JD and the interview.

So pay fairly for your market (check what's actually being offered locally before you set a number), then win on the dimensions where you have a structural advantage. That's how a small business hires good employees without winning a salary war.

Steps 1 through 3, as a fillable workbook: Start the Hire (free)

Define the role, lock your non-negotiables, and write a JD that sells, in one sitting. Plus the 10 Red Flags checklist to run every candidate against before you say yes. Free.

Send me the workbook →

One warning before you run this system: a great process gets good people in the door, and a bad first month walks them right back out.

Three things protect the investment:

The owners who complain "nobody good stays" are usually running a great hiring process into a nonexistent onboarding process. Don't be both halves of that story.

How do I hire employees under an LLC? Same process as any employer: get an EIN, register as an employer with your state, carry workers' comp, run payroll with proper withholding. The LLC structure doesn't change hiring mechanics. A single-member LLC hires exactly like any other small business.

What's the best way to pay employees in a small business? A payroll provider (Gusto, OnPay, QuickBooks Payroll, that tier). It calculates withholding, files payroll taxes, and generates W-2s. Paying under the table, or misclassifying employees as 1099 contractors to skip payroll, is the most expensive shortcut in small business.

How much does it cost to hire an employee? Beyond wages, budget roughly 25-40% extra. Payroll taxes and workers' comp are the mandatory piece, around 10% of wages per BLS data. Tools, software, and any benefits you offer make up the rest. So a $50K hire realistically runs $62,500 to $70,000 a year. The bigger cost is hiring the wrong person: months of wages, your management time, and a restart.

Jordan DiPietro has spent 20+ years hiring for The Motley Fool, The Hustle, HubSpot, and Hampton, and is the creator of Hiring OS, the opinionated hiring system for growth-stage founders.

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