Advice on employing part timer

[Random63638]

I am looking to start a business in September/October and would like some advice. I will need one or two people part-time Mon to Fri to pick, pack and ship orders. The business is brand new so work will be slow to begin with then will hopefully pick up.

Are there certain amounts of hours I should think about offering? The work can totally be within school hours so I'd like to encourage someone who might struggle to find a job like that. I don't know much about universal credit and wondering what would be a help/hindrance in terms of hours?

Job would pay the slightly higher living wage, not minimum wage, which I think is £9.30 outside of London.

I know there are employment forums but wanted to canvas opinions from the employees perspective as much as possible. Thank you if you can help!

You say you need one or two people. Well, is it one, or two?

You need to think about exactly how many hours it's going to be, and if that increases then that could be an issue.

My experience of working for very small, family-owned companies is that they hire people to do stuff that they found time-consuming, but then find the dedicated person gets it done in far fewer hours due to not doing other stuff, and then they get blamed for not doing enough work. Anyone with experience of this will be very wary of working for you.

You need to write a proper job description and not just "I need someone to be flexible and pro-active, make the job their own" which usually ends badly.

I'm estimating 40 hours of work initially, so depending on the circumstances I could employ one or two people. If I took on two at 20 hours each and work increased I could increase their hours or hire a third person, depending on what suited everyone.

The job description will be very clear, I'm sorry you experienced frustration with small employers, I don't think that's a given.