Hiring your first employee: what changes?
Many small businesses start without permanent staff. They work with freelancers, sometimes for years, and it works well.
At some point, something shifts. The collaboration becomes more regular. The freelancer is there almost all the time. They know the business inside out, they're part of meetings, and sometimes you celebrate things together.
Somewhere in that process, you start wondering: should I just put this person on payroll? When you make that decision, the step feels small, and in some ways it is. But there are quite a few things to take into account.
What changes in practice
The administrative responsibility: it now falls entirely on you.
Register with the tax authority. When you hire someone for the first time, you register as an employer with the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (Belastingdienst). You receive a payroll tax number, which you use to remit payroll taxes every month. Do this before your employee's first day.
Identity check. You are required to verify your employee's identity before their first working day and keep a copy of their ID in their employee record. If your employee doesn't have Dutch nationality, you also need to check whether they're allowed to work in the Netherlands.
An employment contract. Sounds obvious, but with freelancers you probably worked with a contractor agreement. Now you're setting out employment terms: hours, salary, vacation days, probationary period. Check whether a collective labor agreement (CLA) applies to your sector, because some CLAs apply automatically.
An occupational health service. As an employer, you're required to have a contract with a certified occupational health service or company doctor. You'll need this if someone goes on long-term sick leave, so arranging it before you hire is smarter than finding out when it's already necessary.
Tracking leave. Every employee accrues vacation days: at minimum four times their weekly contract hours per year. With freelancers, you didn't need to track this. Now you do.
Sick leave and the Wet verbetering Poortwachter. From conversations I've had with small business owners, this is consistently the most underestimated part. Once someone is on extended sick leave, you have a series of obligations as an employer: a problem analysis, a reintegration plan, and a report to the UWV (Dutch Employee Insurance Agency) in week 42. Miss a deadline and it could cost you an extra year of continued salary payments. We've written a separate article about this: The Wet verbetering Poortwachter: the complete timeline →
What doesn't change
The way you treat people. If you've been treating freelancers like colleagues for years, the culture is already there. An employment contract doesn't change the relationship, it just formalizes it.
How Heartsome helps
If you do take that step, it's a good moment to get your HR set up properly from the start. Not with a spreadsheet you'll stop updating after a month, but with one place where everything lives.
In Heartsome, you keep employee records, including contracts and ID documents. Leave and sick leave are tracked automatically. And if you're also looking for your second employee, the recruitment side is built in too.
Or read more about Heartsome for small businesses →