Nobody taught you this part of running a business

Write the job description around outcomes, not tasks. “Owns weekly financial reporting” tells a candidate more than “good with numbers,” and tells you more about who to hire.

Pick your channels and stick to them. Posting everywhere and seeing what sticks just means you’re evaluating five different applicant pools with five different quality bars.

Decide your compensation range before the first interview, not after you’ve already mentally hired someone and are negotiating against your own enthusiasm.

Use a consistent set of interview questions for every candidate at a given stage. It’s the only way to actually compare people instead of comparing vibes — and it happens to be exactly what the EEOC recommends to keep your process defensible.

Check references with real questions — “would you rehire them?” gets you a polite non-answer. “What did they need the most support with?” gets you something useful.

Decide on a scorecard before the interviews start — what matters for this specific role — so you’re not retrofitting your reasoning after you’ve already decided you like someone.

Build a first-week checklist: paperwork, equipment, logins, who they shadow. The SBA’s own hiring guide is a decent starting checklist if you don’t have one yet. If it takes you longer to remember what a new hire needs than it took to hire them, that’s the tell.

Schedule 30/60/90-day check-ins at the start, not “whenever it comes up” — which, for most owners, is another way of saying never.

Write down the framework itself once it works. The whole point is that hire number 12 shouldn’t require you to remember what you did for hire number three.

Run a stay interview, not just an exit interview. Ask directly: “What would make you leave, and what would make the next five years better than the last five?”

You’ll usually hear something fixable — no growth path, a manager problem, a skill they want to build — long before it becomes a two-weeks’-notice email.

Nobody needs a promotion every year, but everyone needs to believe one is possible.

A simple ladder — even a rough one you sketch out and actually share — answers the “Where is this going?” question before someone answers it by leaving.

Flexible hours, a real professional development budget, or clearer ownership of a project often keep people longer than an equivalent raise would.

That’s because they solve the actual problem — boredom, rigidity, feeling replaceable — instead of just paying someone more to put up with it.

People rarely resent the salary itself, they resent not understanding why one person got a raise and another didn’t.

Be upfront about how those decisions happen, and most of that resentment disappears on its own.

Nonqualified deferred compensation: promise a future payout on a vesting schedule. The employee doesn’t owe tax until they receive it, and walking away early usually means forfeiting the unvested chunk.

Retirement plan enhancements: a richer match or profit-sharing contribution is deductible to you now, untaxed to them until withdrawal.

Equity-linked structures: phantom stock, stock appreciation rights, or actual vesting equity for the people you genuinely cannot afford to lose. The tax treatment depends heavily on how the grant is written, so talk to a tax professional before you promise anyone equity, not after.

Employer FICA — 7.65%. 6.2% Social Security (up to $184,500 in wages) + 1.45% Medicare (uncapped). Separate from what comes out of the employee’s paycheck — this is your bill.

Federal unemployment tax (FUTA) — 6.0% on the first $7,000 of wages, usually knocked down to ~0.6% (about $42/employee) with the state credit.

State unemployment (SUTA) — varies. Rate depends on your state, industry, and layoff history. More turnover, higher rate.

Workers’ comp — ~$1 per $100 of payroll, on average. Priced by job risk, so a roofing crew can pay 15–20x what an office job pays.

Health insurance — ~$8,000/year, if you offer single coverage. Family coverage costs more.

401(k) match — whatever percentage you’ve committed to, paid every year regardless of the market.

Soft costs — recruiting, onboarding, equipment, software, and your own time training someone instead of running the business.

A sample stay interview question bank — six categories of questions (engagement, growth, manager fit, recognition, flexibility, retention risk), plus a table mapping what you hear back to what to actually do about it

True cost of an employee worksheet — walk through employer FICA, unemployment tax, workers’ comp, and benefits on your own numbers to find your real, fully loaded cost per hire before you post the job

🎧 Listen: “Employee Retention in Small Business” — “Coaching for Leaders” host Dave Stachowiak talks with Chris Deferio about the practical realities of keeping people at a small business, including how to think about turnover without letting it stop you from investing in your team. A good companion to this week’s retention piece.

🛠️ Use: Fit Small Business’s free interview evaluation forms and scorecard templates — eight editable forms for standardizing how you score candidates at the evaluate stage, so you’re comparing notes instead of gut feelings. Free, no sign-up, editable in Google Sheets or downloadable as a PDF.

📖 Read: The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “Employer Costs for Employee Compensation” — the actual government data behind the “benefits add roughly 30%” figure, straight from the source. Updated quarterly, and worth bookmarking any time you want current numbers instead of someone else’s summary of them.

📲 Try: Keeping good people is hard. Overpaying for average ones is easy to avoid. Oceans Talent connects you with skilled EAs, Marketing, Finance, and Ops pros for up to 80% less than U.S. hiring costs. Get $1,000 off your first hire — build a lean team you can actually afford to keep (sponsored).