Part 2 of a Four-Part Series on Post-Award Hiring Risk for SMB GovCon Teams
In Part 1, I wrote about why GovCon hiring often breaks down after award, even when capture planning was solid. Time passes, assumptions loosen, and the market moves in ways the original plan was never designed to absorb.
But here's what makes it even more complicated: where you sit in the contract structure determines how that volatility actually shows up.
Primes and subcontractors both feel post-award hiring pressure, but the forces driving it are completely different. Those differences matter because they influence how much control you have, how compensation conversations evolve, and how flexible your staffing decisions need to remain once execution begins.
When You're the Prime
Prime contractors carry visibility and responsibility from the moment the award is announced.
Agencies expect execution to begin quickly, even if funding details, onboarding logistics, or tasking priorities are still settling. Program timelines are real. Delivery expectations are real. The hiring pressure arrives fast, often before all the variables are fully known.
What changes for primes after award is rarely the existence of roles. It's the shape of them. Labor mix shifts as scope firms up. Onsite expectations become clearer. Clearance timelines, badging, and access realities surface. Roles that appeared straightforward during capture require different tradeoffs once execution starts.
This is also where compensation conversations tend to resurface. Salary ranges that made sense during capture may no longer align cleanly with the market or with the labor category the role ultimately maps to. Candidates who were comfortable earlier start asking different questions once expectations sharpen.
These aren't unreasonable requests. They're a natural response to clarity arriving later than anyone would prefer.
For primes, the challenge is that recruiting conversations don't happen in isolation. Adjusting salary or role expectations has downstream implications for billing, margin, and internal equity. The prime still owns delivery, even as these variables move underneath them.
When You're a Subcontractor
For subcontractors, the challenge is different and often less visible.
You may win work, but you don't control the final staffing plan. After award, primes may rebalance allocations across subs, adjust bill rates, or shift headcount as they manage risk and agency pressure. Roles you expected to ramp immediately may slow or be re-scoped, while others accelerate with little notice.
This is where flexibility in candidate conversations becomes critical. Employment structure decisions that felt settled during capture often need to be revisited. Some candidates are comfortable with W2 early on, then prefer 1099 once timelines stretch. Others move in the opposite direction as stability becomes more important.
These aren't decisions candidates make once and forget about. They evolve as personal risk tolerance, market conditions, and program clarity change.
I worked with one small subcontractor that built a strong cleared pipeline during capture. After award, the prime reduced the initial staffing allocation and lowered the bill rate for several roles. Two candidates exited the process immediately. Another remained interested, but only after revisiting compensation and employment structure once the new realities became clear.
The subcontractor hadn't mismanaged recruiting. The ground had shifted.
Why This Gets Harder Than It Looks
Traditional recruiting models assume stability. They assume requisitions stay open, requirements remain fixed, and offers move forward in a straight line.
Post-award GovCon hiring rarely behaves that way.
For primes, the pressure comes from owning delivery while variables continue to change. For subcontractors, it comes from absorbing shifts they don't control. In both cases, compensation alignment, labor category fit, and employment structure aren't static decisions. They're conversations that resurface as clarity improves.
When recruiting is treated as a transaction, those conversations feel disruptive. When recruiting stays aligned with program and financial realities, they become manageable—even when the answers aren't immediate.
The Common Thread
Primes and subcontractors experience post-award hiring differently, but the underlying issue is the same.
Hiring plans are forced to absorb uncertainty they were never designed to handle. When recruiting can't flex with post-award reality, teams lose control. Program Managers react instead of plan. Candidates sense instability, and risk compounds quietly until it shows up in delivery.
This isn't about effort or intent. It's about context.
This is where having a Client Delivery Lead makes a practical difference. Because they manage just 3-4 clients, they have the capacity to stay aligned with both prime and subcontractor realities as they evolve. When bill rates change or allocations shift, they're already in those conversations—adjusting candidate discussions, managing expectations, and maintaining pipeline flexibility without forcing hard resets. For subs especially, having someone who can pivot employment structure conversations as program economics firm up often means the difference between keeping talent engaged and losing them to uncertainty.
What This Sets Up
The longer uncertainty lasts, the more hiring readiness erodes.
That uncertainty doesn't come only from the dynamics between primes and subcontractors. It's often amplified by forces neither side controls—award delays, protests, and incumbent extensions.
That's where time becomes the real adversary.
This article is Part 2 of a four-part series on post-award hiring challenges for SMB GovCon teams.
Next: In Part 3, we examine how award delays, protests, and incumbent extensions quietly undermine hiring readiness before execution even begins. Click here to navigate to Part 3.
About the Author
Jeff Packard has spent more than a decade supporting talent acquisition for small, mid-market, and large GovCon teams, working across capture, post-award ramp, and program execution. Through BizFirst, he leads recruiting delivery for government contractors and commercial clients, applying the same execution-focused approach across both markets.
