How to Hire the Right Employee: A Recruitment Guide for Small Business
Hiring someone is a significant decision for any business, but in a small business the impact is often felt much more quickly.
The right person can take pressure off you, strengthen the team and create capacity for the business to grow.
The wrong person can have the opposite effect. You can find yourself spending more time managing, checking or correcting work than you expected, while the rest of the team picks up the slack. Then there is also a very real financial cost.
What Does Hiring the Wrong Employee Cost?
ELMO’s 2026 Australian HR Industry Benchmark Report found that businesses were spending an average of around $17,000 to hire an employee.
On average, it was taking 25 days to fill a vacancy, followed by another 44 days before a new employee reached full productivity.
Those figures won’t look exactly the same in every small business, but they demonstrate an important point: getting the wrong person in the role can mean paying much of that cost twice.
Take someone earning $80,000 a year. If they remain with the business for 12 weeks before it becomes clear the appointment isn’t working, you have already paid around $18,500 in wages alone. Then there's superannuation, recruitment and advertising costs, training, your own time, the time other employees have spent supporting them, and potentially the cost of mistakes or lost productivity. If you then need to recruit again, the process starts over.
That doesn’t mean every hire needs to become a lengthy or complicated exercise, but it does mean it is worth putting some structure around the decision.
Start With What Your Business Actually Needs
One of the most common hiring mistakes businesses make is jumping straight into advertising without first getting clear on what they actually need.
Someone leaves, the business is under pressure, and the immediate response is to advertise the same role as quickly as possible.
But before you do that, take a little time to work out whether you actually need to replace like-for-like. Businesses change, responsibilities shift and sometimes the role you needed two years ago isn’t quite the role you need now.
Before advertising, consider:
What are the three or four most important outcomes I need this person to deliver?
What do they genuinely need to know or be able to do from day one, and what could reasonably be taught?
Which behaviours and ways of working matter in this team?
What would make me say, six months from now, “this was a good hire”?
That clarity makes almost every part of recruitment easier. It helps you write a better position description, a more targeted advertisement and better interview questions. Most importantly, it gives you something objective to assess candidates against instead of relying too heavily on whether you simply “liked” someone at interview.
This is also the stage to confirm the practical employment arrangements: whether the position will be full-time, part-time or casual, the relevant Award or enterprise agreement, the classification and the salary or wage you intend to offer.
If you include a pay rate in a job advertisement, it cannot be below the applicable minimum entitlement.
Whether a role needs to be formally advertised will depend on the circumstances and any internal requirements that apply to your business. We explain that in more detail here: "Do you have to advertise a job before hiring in Australia?"
Write The Job Ad To Attract the Right Person
A position description and a job advertisement serve different purposes.
Your position description explains the role. Your advertisement needs to make the right person interested enough to apply.
That doesn’t mean overselling the business or making the workplace sound like the “perfect place to work”.
Explain what the role is there to achieve, what the person will actually be responsible for and what working in your business is like.
If it is a busy position, say so.
If the person needs to be comfortable working independently, make that clear.
If there is plenty of opportunity to develop but the role also involves routine administration, candidates should understand both.
The aim isn’t to attract the greatest possible number of applicants. It is to attract enough of the right applicants.
A clear, honest advertisement also helps candidates make their own decision about whether the position suits them. That matters because recruitment works both ways. A candidate who accepts a role based on an unrealistic impression of the job is much more likely to become a retention issue later.
Interview With a Clear Purpose
A good interview should feel like a conversation, but it still needs structure.
Without that structure, it is very easy to spend 45 minutes or so having an enjoyable discussion with someone and finish without knowing much more about whether they can actually do the job.
Decide beforehand what you need to establish and ask each candidate broadly consistent questions around those areas. This makes candidates easier to compare and reduces the risk of your decision being driven by first impressions.
Rather than asking someone whether they are organised, ask them to talk you through a situation where they had several competing priorities and explain how they managed them.
Rather than asking whether they are good with difficult customers, ask about a time they dealt with an unhappy customer, what they did and what happened next.
Specific examples usually tell you far more than hypothetical answers.
Listen carefully to what the person actually did rather than what “the team” did. Ask follow-up questions where something is vague. It is also perfectly fine to leave a little silence after an answer rather than immediately moving to the next question. Candidates will often add useful information once they have had a moment to think.
Keep questions relevant to the role and the person’s ability to perform it. Prospective employees are protected from discrimination during recruitment, so decisions should be based on genuine job requirements rather than protected personal characteristics.
Use Reference Checks to Test What You Already Know
Reference checks are most useful when they are treated as another assessment step rather than a final box to tick.
By the time you contact referees, you should already know which areas you want to explore further.
If the candidate has told you they were responsible for leading a team of eight, confirm what that leadership responsibility actually involved.
If their greatest strength appears to be taking initiative, ask the referee what that looked like in practice.
Questions such as “Would you employ this person again?” can be useful, but the follow-up is often more important: “Why?” or “In what type of environment do you think they perform at their best?”
You are trying to build a consistent picture across the application, interview, assessments and references. If those pieces don't line up, it is worth understanding why before you make the offer.
Hire for Values, Not Just Skills
Skills can be taught, but values usually can't. Yes, technical skills are important, but values and mindset determine whether someone will succeed long-term.
Technically brilliant people can derail a team because they didn't share the same approach or mindset.
On the other hand, someone who aligns strongly with your values can often grow into the role faster than expected.
Think about your business values and ask candidates for examples that show how they’ve demonstrated similar behaviours. For example:
If collaboration is important in your workplace, ask candidates for examples of times they worked as part of a team.
If you value continuous improvement, ask what they have done recently to develop themselves.
The way people answer often tells you if they will truly fit in.
Think About the Team as a Whole
You are not hiring someone in isolation. Think about the people they will work with, where the current team is strong and where there are gaps.
Sometimes the best hire is not just another version of your strongest employee. You may need someone who brings greater structure to a highly creative team, someone who is confident dealing with customers, or someone who can work independently because their manager simply doesn't have capacity to provide constant direction.
It is also worth being realistic about the manager they will report to. A relatively inexperienced employee may be a very good long-term hire, but only if someone in the business genuinely has the time and capability to develop them.
The question is not only “Is this a good candidate?” It is also “Is this the right candidate for this role, this team and the way our business operates?”
Review What Worked - And What Didn't
No recruitment process gets every appointment right. What matters is learning from each one.
If you received plenty of applications but very few suitable candidates, the advertisement or sourcing strategy may need work.
If someone interviewed extremely well but struggled once they started, consider whether your interview questions tested the right things.
If good people regularly leave within the first few months, the issue may be less about recruitment and more about what happens after they arrive.
A small amount of reflection after each recruitment round can make the next one noticeably better. Done right, it can significantly reduce time-to-hire and improve candidate quality.
And if recruitment is becoming one of those jobs that keeps getting pushed down the list because running the business has to come first, outsourcing some or all of the process can be a sensible option.
We explain some of the reasons businesses choose to do that here: "The smarter way to hire: why outsourcing recruitment just makes sense"
Final Thoughts on How To Hire The Right Employee
How to hire the right employee isn't about luck, it is about clarity, structure, and consistency. When you know what you need, write job ads that attract the right people, interview with purpose, and check for values as much as skills, you improve your chances of success.
A structured process does take some time upfront. But compared with the time and cost involved in managing a poor appointment and then starting again, it is usually time well spent.
If you don't have the time or internal resources to give recruitment the attention it needs, we can manage the process for you, from defining the role and advertising through to screening, interviews, reference checks and the employment offer, for a clear fixed fee.
👉 Book a free discovery call today. Let’s make recruitment the least of your worries.
Need help? Contact us today - sandra@hrconsultingtas.com.au or 0408 408 225
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