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.
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.
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

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
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.
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.

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
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