If you consider your staff your most important asset and treat them accordingly, you are already half way there. More often than not, your employees are the face of your business, hence recruiting the wrong staff can be detrimental to your success.

Hiring staff is an involved and sometimes difficult process but it pays to get it right the first time. The task of hiring can be made much easier if you develop job descriptions prior to advertising a role. This way you have a good picture of the sort of people you are looking for and applicants are clear of the job requirements. In addition, you can develop job criteria from your job descriptions and use the criteria to assess each applicant.

There are a variety of methods that can be used to recruit staff. For instance the most obvious is an advertisement in the newspaper or online. The less obvious are the engaging of recruitment companies, contractors, apprentices, trainees and freelance employees. Positions are also filled by word of mouth so networking can be a very important recruitment strategy. 

Most importantly, always ensure that you conduct reference checks as your final screening mechanism; a reference check could save you a lot of time, money and heart ache.

To review how well you understand your staff needs and responsibilities, complete the Recruiting, managing and developing staff diagnostic. This is a multiple-choice quiz, which will help assess areas in which you perform well and highlight areas for improvement.

The Department publishes a variety of information on running your business including staff recruitment and management fact sheets.

The Department of Education and Training has a wide variety of resources available on:

• employee inductions
• apprenticeships and traineeships
• funding and incentives for employing and training apprentices and trainees, mature aged, Indigenous workers or people with a disability
• how to train your staff.

In terms of employer responsibilities, the following information is available:

• your obligations relating to employees under the Commonwealth Tax Act through the Australian Taxation Office
  
  
• Industrial Relations information is available through the Australian Workplace website
  
  
• awards, pay rates, employee entitlements, employee hiring/termination, workers compensation information is available through Wageline
  
  
• workplace health and safety requirements information available through Workplace Health and Safety Queensland
  
  
• Anti-discrimination legislation and equal employment information available through Anti-Discrimination Commission Queensland.