Change ""Employee"" look up field matchin the record owner upon creating the record

In the table "Ticket requests", I have a lookup field to the parent table "Employees". I would like that the ticket request record automatically sets the value of the look up field to match the record owner. Reason is that I want to profile "ticket request" depending on certain information that is related to the employee creating it (BU, country, supervisor, etc), ie the record owner.
How I can do this?
I have tried to create a rule that upon creating the record changes the "Employee" lookup to the record owner, but it fails to do this, as record owner is allocated after this moment. If I edit the same record after saving and save it again, then the rule functions and "Employee" matches the record owner.