Event Planning Series - Event Management (Part II)
- Alex Genadinik
- Jul 17, 2024
- 3 min read
Hiring event staff
There will come a time when—hopefully—your event series will become popular and grow too big for just one person to run the event well. That is when you will need to hire staff to help. This might seem daunting because you want competent and trustworthy personnel at your events, which can be expensive. But there are ways to get quality staff for free or at an affordable rate.
For example, as soon as you start charging for attendance, some people will ask you for a favor to give them free access. These people might be students or individuals who can’t afford to pay. You can give them free access in exchange for doing a specific job at the event.
Another way to get free help is to ask friends or family to assist at your events. They will often be glad to help at one or a few events. You just probably can’t rely on them helping for free long-term.
If you can’t get enough free labor, you can get affordable labor on local concierge websites like fancyhands.com, taskrabbit.com, and even craigslist.com, where you can find people who will do random jobs. You can hire them for a day to help with your event. In the United States, the average fee listed on these sites for a full day’s work is only $100 or less. For just a few hours of work, you can often pay under $50.
The websites I mentioned are popular in the United States, but may not be as widely used abroad. To find similar sites that are popular in your area, search Google for “hire someone for one day in CITY” and fill in the name of your actual city.
Hiring staff once you have an effective revenue model might help you make more money because if your staff can improve the events, attendees will have a better experience, be more likely to attend future events, bring friends, and buy additional products or services you promote.
When you’re looking to hire people from an online source, you must meet and interview them before the event, no matter how good their online reviews are. The meeting doesn’t have to take long. Often, just a 10-15 minute conversation can help you determine whether they are appropriate for your event. You won’t always be correct in the judgment you make after 10-15 minutes, but at least you weed out some of the very low-quality workers. Some key general qualities to look for are integrity, friendliness, eagerness to do a good job, enthusiasm, team player, and willingness to learn.
Hiring bad staff can turn off your attendees, waste your time and money, discourage other employees, and lower morale. If you can’t have an in-person meeting with potential hires, at least talk to them on the phone or a video chat to assess their communication skills, personality, and overall skill set.
If possible, it is great to have both junior and senior people on your staff. Junior people can do basic tasks that senior people may not want to do, but experienced staff will bring greater foresight, knowledge, experience, quality, professionalism, and ability to get more things done to your events.
New entrepreneurs sometimes think that they are saving money by hiring cheap labor. However, cheap labor often requires more training and managing, so you end up spending more of your precious time with them. The quality of execution also suffers if you cut corners by hiring the cheapest possible staff. For instance, it might take a junior person a day or week to execute what an experienced person can do in an hour. The senior person avoids mistakes, has a shorter learning curve, and does not take things in the wrong direction, whereas a junior person might waste time learning how to do things going through the pains of a learning curve, fixing their own mistakes, and asking for help.
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