How to hire your first employee

4 of March, 2025

There comes a time when an entrepreneur is unable to handle the entire workload, and needs to hire the first employee so that their project can continue to grow. Have you reached this point? Congratulations, it’s not easy to achieve this goal; but surely you have doubts about a process that can seem very uphill if you have never faced it. Luckily, you just have to take a series of steps to hire an employee and start the hiring process.

What kind of contract will you provide?

The first thing you should be clear about is the needs of the company. It’s not the same to need a full-time worker as someone working part-time or an employee that you can hire for certain projects. If you’re not sure, there are three questions you should ask yourself:

• How much work do you have? The amount of work you can give at the present moment, or what you can delegate, is very important.
• How much work will you have? It’s also important to forecast future work and the skills or experience needed.
• What economic effect will it have? Hiring an employee has a significant economic cost, so you should calculate how much you will have to pay in salary, taxes or contributions, in addition to any possible subsidies you may have access to.

From the answer to these three questions, it will be easier for you to decide what type of contract you can offer. Do not forget to inform yourself about the different hiring options you have, as it may be more beneficial for you to offer a fixed-discontinuous contract than a temporary or indefinite one.

Register with the Social Security System

Before hiring the first employee, it will be necessary for you to register with the Social Security System as an employer. They will assign you a contribution account code that you must indicate in the request TA.6 to the General Treasury of the Social Security (TGSS) along with your identification document and the document of the economic activity of the company. Remember that you should take this step before the recruitment of the worker.

The selection process to hire the first employee

Now you have everything ready, so you just need to publish the job offer and start receiving the resumes of the candidates. Being the first time you face a process like this, all help is good and having a staff recruitment software for your company like Sesame will always be an excellent choice. Not only because it allows you to register all the candidates, but because you can adjust it so that it tells you which is the right employee for the position you need to fill in.

You will have a candidate panel where the different applicants who have sent their resume to your company will appear, with the key information about each one of them. You can gather all the candidate information (resume, experience, portfolio, recommendation letters and references, or any other information you need) and keep track of the process. If that isn’t enough, you will also have a candidate history. Thus, if you need to hire a second worker in the future, you can go to it to speed up the process.

The job interview

In Sesame, you can include a requirements checklist, indicating those met by the candidate. This is one of the things you should ask in the job interview. Of course, the interview should revolve around the job: the candidate’s education and experience, what he/she can contribute, what he/she expects from the job, and what you can offer. If you have the candidate’s resume, you will know their strong and weak points. You should ask about these in search of the answers that will determine whether they are the ideal candidate or not.

The paperwork: how to register a worker

You have finally found the ideal candidate, so now you just have to solve one issue: how to register a worker so they can join your company as soon as possible. First of all, it is worth noting that if you are offering them their first job, it will be necessary to affiliate them with the Social Security System. This is a procedure that serves for a lifetime, so if they have previous experience, you won’t need to repeat it.

The request to join the Social Security System can be made up to 60 days before the employee joins the company, and you must submit all this information:

• Name or trade name of the employer requesting the registration
• Employer’s Contribution Account Code
• Social Security Scheme
• Name, surname, address, ID, and Social Security number of the worker
• Start date of the activity
• Contribution Group
• Contract type (and working hours percentage)
• Occupation (only in cases provided by law)

Next, you must register the employment contract with the SEPE (Public State Employment Service). You have 10 days to do so, and you can submit it through their website. Once you have completed this step, your worker is already registered and can start working. Don’t forget that you will have to pay your Social Security contributions and those of the hired worker in the month following accrual.

As you can see, hiring the first employee is not very complex. You just need to comply with all the required procedures, and if you also have a hiring software that helps you optimize the selection process, it will be much easier for you to hire the right worker.

Cristina Martin

People and Talent Director | LinkedIn | | Web | +post

Professional with over 20 years of extensive experience in various areas of Human Resources (Recruitment, Training, Occupational Risk Prevention, and Personnel Management). Experience in the Management Department: Broad understanding of the company and HR.

Latest posts by Cristina Martin

• Benefits of a strategic recruitment and selection plan
• How to hire your first employee
• Types of talents you should have in your company
• Differences between recruitment and staff selection
• The most useful staff selection tools for recruitment