The standard model for business hiring is to pay someone a paycheck, get them a desk or a cube and pay them for the time they sit there, during which you presume they are increasing the value of your company more than you are paying them. When people hire other people for their own purposes, the model is flipped. Very few of us have fulltime personal employees. Almost all of us have scores of implicitly contracted employees. Go to a restaurant? You’re briefly contracting the time of a chef and a server. Get a haircut? Hire a lawyer? Same thing. The objective we strive for when we make personal hiring decisions is less clear than when a business does it, but our criteria for evaluating who to hire and how to hire them is largely the same: maximize the benefits less the hassle and cost, subject to time and money contraints.