Talent Acquisition and People Strategy: Insights&Advice

Why Event-Based Hiring Keeps Resetting Your Startup

TL;DR

If hiring in your startup feels like a recurring emergency, the problem isn’t talent availability or recruiter quality. It’s that hiring is treated as an event, not a system. Event-based hiring resets context, ownership, and learning every time — slowing execution, exhausting founders, and repeating the same mistakes quarter after quarter.

Hiring Doesn’t Fail Loudly. It Resets Quietly.

Most Series A–C startups don’t break hiring.
They restart it.
A role opens.
Urgency spikes.
Everyone gets involved.
Interviews happen.
A decision is made.
Illustration showing event-based hiring versus strategic hiring, with roles opening, pausing, and decisions made without retained ownership, causing hiring resets.
Event-based hiring treats each role as a standalone event — urgency spikes, decisions are made, priorities shift, and ownership dissolves before learning can compound.
Then:
  • priorities shift
  • the role pauses
  • context evaporates
  • ownership dissolves
Three months later, the same role is open again — and it feels like starting from zero.
That’s not bad luck.
That’s event-based hiring.
If you want to sanity-check what’s breaking in your hiring system, we can walk through it together.
👉 Book a conversation

What Is Event-Based Hiring?

Event-based hiring is when recruiting is triggered only by pressure:
  • a resignation
  • a missed target
  • a stalled roadmap
  • a board question
Hiring becomes a reaction, not an operating capability.
Diagram illustrating the dimensions of event-based hiring, including reactive hiring, role redefinition, shifting expectations, inconsistent criteria, and lost learning.
Event-based hiring fragments execution across multiple dimensions — reactive decisions, unstable roles, shifting expectations, and learning that never carries forward.
In this model:
  • roles are redefined every time
  • expectations drift
  • interview criteria change
  • learning is lost between cycles
Each hiring push is treated as a standalone project — instead of a continuation of an owned system.
This reset logic is also embedded in how most startups pay for hiring.
→ Why “Paying Per Hire” Is the Most Expensive Hiring Model

Why Event-Based Hiring Slows Execution

1. Context Is Lost Every Time

When hiring stops, the understanding of why the role exists disappears with it.
Next cycle:
  • new stakeholders
  • new assumptions
  • new success definitions
The team debates fundamentals again — instead of improving decisions.
Execution doesn’t slow because people are missing.
In most cases, adding people actually increases friction when execution capacity isn’t ready.
→ Hiring Is Not the Bottleneck — Execution Capacity Is
It slows because context keeps resetting.

2. Ownership Quietly Erodes

In event-based hiring:
  • no one owns hiring outcomes between roles
  • responsibility spikes only during interviews
  • accountability ends at the offer
This is what happens when hiring decisions collect input but lose a clear owner.
→ When Hiring Slows, Decision Ownership Has Already Broken
Once the hire is made, hiring ownership disappears — until the next crisis.
This is how founders end up permanently pulled back in.
Over time, this repeated re-entry drains energy and focus — even when headcount is growing.
→ Why Founders Burn Out on Hiring Before the Team Ever Scales
Iceberg-style illustration showing how event-based hiring slows execution through lost context, eroded ownership, and lack of compounding learning beneath the surface.
Execution slows not because roles are unfilled, but because context, ownership, and learning reset between hiring cycles.

3. Learning Never Compounds

Strong hiring systems get better over time.
Event-based hiring doesn’t.
Why?
  • interview signals aren’t tracked
  • mis-hire patterns aren’t documented
  • role definitions aren’t refined
The organisation pays the cost of experience — without keeping the benefit.
This is why hiring often feels just as hard on the tenth role as it did on the first.
→ Why Your Hiring Never Gets Better — Even After Dozens of Roles

Why “More Recruiters” Doesn’t Fix This

Adding recruiters to an event-based model only increases activity, not leverage.
You may get:
  • faster pipelines
  • more candidates
  • better coordination
Diagram showing the impact of adding more recruiters, highlighting faster pipelines and more candidates without improving decision ownership or execution clarity.
Adding recruiters increases activity, not leverage — pipelines grow, but ownership, execution clarity, and founder involvement remain unchanged.
But you won’t get:
  • clearer execution expectations
  • stronger decision ownership
  • reduced founder involvement
Because the underlying problem isn’t capacity.
It’s continuity.

Continuous Hiring Is an Execution System

Startups that scale don’t hire more often.
They hire continuously.
Circular diagram illustrating a continuous hiring cycle with maintained ownership, evolving roles, stabilised criteria, explicit signals, and system integration.
Continuous hiring works when ownership persists between roles, allowing criteria to stabilise, roles to evolve, and decisions to improve over time.
Continuous hiring means:
  • hiring is always owned — even when no roles are open
  • roles evolve instead of resetting
  • decision criteria are stable
  • execution signals are explicit
Hiring becomes part of the operating system — not a quarterly fire drill.

What Changes When Hiring Is Continuous

Hiring decisions improve

Because past outcomes inform future ones.

Founders step back

Because ownership doesn’t disappear between hires.
Illustration comparing intermittent hiring with continuous hiring, showing the transition from tangled decision paths to structured, connected execution.
Illustration comparing intermittent hiring with continuous hiring, showing the transition from tangled decision paths to structured, connected execution.

Mis-hires decrease

Because expectations are explicit before interviews begin.

Execution accelerates

Because new hires enter a system — not ambiguity.

This Is Why Recruitment as a Subscription Exists

Subscription-based or fractional talent ownership isn’t a pricing model.
Some startups solve this internally. Others temporarily bring in external ownership to stabilise the system.
→ Recruitment as a Subscription
It’s a structural fix.
It solves the real problem:
  • loss of context
  • fragmented ownership
  • episodic decision-making
Comparison illustration showing fragmented recruitment versus recruitment as a subscription, highlighting continuous ownership and compounding hiring outcomes.
Recruitment as a subscription shifts hiring from episodic transactions to continuous ownership — stopping resets and allowing hiring capability to compound.
By keeping hiring continuously owned — even when nothing is open — startups stop resetting and start compounding.

The Question Founders Should Ask

Not:
“How fast can we fill this role?”
But:
“Who owns hiring outcomes when we’re not hiring?”
If the answer is unclear, execution will eventually slow — no matter how strong your candidates are.

Final Thought

Hiring doesn’t break your startup.
Restarting it does.
When hiring is treated as an event, execution resets.
When hiring is treated as a system, execution compounds.
That difference is where scale actually happens.
This shift — from episodic hiring to continuous ownership — is what separates scaling teams from stalled ones.

About the author

Olga Fedoseeva is the Founder of UnitiQ, a talent acquisition and People Projects partner for Tech Startups across EU, UKI, and MENA.
She works with founders in Fintech, AI, Crypto, and Robotics to prevent mis-hires before they compound — restoring execution momentum and protecting teams from quiet burnout.
Talent Acquisition