How Do You Know When You're Ready to Hire?

You're ready to hire when three things are true at the same time: the work adds up to a genuine full-time seat, that work is consistent rather than seasonal, and nobody already on your payroll can absorb it. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 I've built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. Almost every hiring mess I get called into started long before the job was posted — with an owner who hired on a feeling instead of running those three checks.

What are the three questions to ask before you hire?

Ask whether the position is full-time, whether the work is consistent, and whether someone you already have could fill the seat. That's it. Three questions, and you should be able to answer all three out loud before you write a single line of a job posting.

I like these three because they're unsentimental. Hiring is emotional — you're tired, the team is stretched, a customer just complained about response times, and adding a person feels like relief. The three questions pull you out of that feeling and put you back in front of the actual numbers. If you get a clean yes on all three, hire. If you get a no on any one of them, you've just found the real problem, and it isn't headcount.

Is the position actually full-time?

A position is full-time when you can list out forty hours of work a week that only this person would be doing. Not forty hours of work that exists somewhere in the business — forty hours that belong to this seat.

Do it literally. Open a blank page and write Monday through Friday down the side, then fill in what this person does hour by hour. Most owners get to Wednesday afternoon and run out of things to write. That's useful information, not a failure. What you have is a part-time role, a contract project, or two half-jobs you were about to staple together into one confusing position that nobody can succeed at.

A half-full seat is one of the quietest ways to lose a good employee. They show up motivated, run out of work by lunch, start scrolling, and within four months they're interviewing somewhere they'd be busy. You didn't lose them to a competitor. You lost them to boredom you designed.

Is the work consistent, or is this just a busy season?

The work is consistent if it was there six months ago and you're confident it'll be there six months from now — not if it appeared four weeks ago when one big account landed.

Look back across twelve months, not twelve days. Seasonal businesses fool themselves here constantly. The spike is real, the pressure is real, and the instinct to hire permanent staff to survive it is understandable. But a salary is a twelve-month commitment answering a three-month problem. Contract, temporary, or part-time coverage exists exactly for that shape of work, and using it is not a lesser move — it's the correct one.

One more test: if your biggest client left tomorrow, would this position still be needed? If the honest answer is no, you're not hiring for your business. You're hiring for one contract, and you should structure it that way.

Could someone you already have fill the seat?

Very often, yes — and the fastest hire is the one you don't have to make. Before you go external, look hard at whether an existing employee could step into this seat with a promotion and some training, freeing up their current work for a cheaper, easier hire underneath them.

This is the question owners skip most, because looking outside feels like progress and looking inside feels like admitting you haven't organised what you've got. But an internal move gives you someone who already knows your customers, your systems, and your standards. You're only gambling on whether they can do the new work, not on whether they'll fit at all.

It also surfaces a different answer sometimes: the work doesn't need a person, it needs a process. I've walked into businesses about to hire a full-time coordinator to manage a mess that a cleaned-up workflow solved in a fortnight. If three people are each doing a fragment of a job badly because nothing is documented, a fourth person joins the same chaos and makes it slightly louder.

What happens if you hire too early?

You burn cash you needed and you damage a good person's confidence. Those are the two costs, and the second one is the one owners don't see coming.

The cash side is obvious enough — a salary you can't comfortably carry for twelve months is a salary that makes every other decision in the business tighter. The human side is worse. Someone joins a role that doesn't have enough real work in it, so you start inventing tasks to justify the hire. They can feel it. They know busywork when they're handed it. Three months later you're quietly resenting the cost and they're quietly updating their CV, and you both end up telling a story about how it 'just wasn't the right fit.' It was a fine fit. The seat was never real.

What happens if you hire too late?

You end up hiring out of desperation, which is how the genuinely expensive mistakes get made. When the team is already past capacity, your standards quietly drop, your process shortens, and you hire the first person who can start Monday.

I've written before about why you should never hire out of desperation, and the reason it keeps happening is timing, not judgement. Owners wait until the pain is unbearable and then expect a hire to land instantly. Hiring doesn't work at that speed. Across our clients we've cut average time-to-fill from 68 days to 37 — and 37 days is still more than five weeks from 'we need someone' to 'they're at a desk,' before onboarding has even started.

So the practical version of the rule is this: start the process about sixty to ninety days before you actually need the person in the seat. Being early costs you a little patience. Being late costs you a bad hire.

What should you do once all three answers are yes?

Define the role properly before you post anything — the outcomes, the non-negotiables, and how you'll measure the person in their first ninety days. A clear yes on readiness is permission to start, not permission to rush.

That's the same discipline behind the three steps to hiring the right person: know exactly who you're looking for, run a process that tests for it, and hold the standard even when you're tired. Readiness is step zero. Getting it right is what makes the rest of the process worth running.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much revenue should a small business have before hiring its first employee?

There's no universal number, but a workable rule is that you should be able to cover the full cost of the role — salary plus payroll costs, equipment, and onboarding time — for twelve months from predictable revenue, without counting on the new hire to generate it. If the hire has to pay for themselves in month two, you're not hiring, you're gambling.

Should you hire a part-time employee or a contractor if the work isn't full-time yet?

Yes. Part-time and contract arrangements are the right answer for work that's real but not yet forty hours, and they let you watch the workload grow before committing to a permanent salary. Many of the strongest full-time hires I've placed started as part-time or contract people whose seat filled up naturally.

How long does it take to hire someone once you decide you're ready?

Plan for five to nine weeks from decision to start date for most roles, longer for senior or specialised positions. We've brought average time-to-fill down to 37 days with a tight process, but that assumes the role is defined, the interviews are booked quickly, and decisions get made the same week they're needed.

What's the most common sign a business owner is hiring for the wrong reason?

They describe the problem as 'we're overwhelmed' rather than naming a specific seat with specific outcomes. Overwhelm is a symptom. Sometimes the cause is genuinely missing headcount, and sometimes it's an undocumented process, an underperformer nobody has addressed, or a client who should have been fired last year.

If you've run the three checks and you're ready, the next step is building the role properly rather than posting something vague and hoping. That's what we do at CPG Recruitment — you can see how we work with employers on the for employers page or get in touch with me directly. And if you want the same question answered from the agency side, CPG's team wrote their own version: when is a business actually ready to hire?