Part 3 of a four part series on post award hiring risk for SMB GovCon teams
By the time a contract is awarded, many GovCon teams are already operating behind the plan they built during capture. In Part 1, I wrote about how time and market movement erode hiring assumptions. In Part 2, I looked at how primes and subcontractors experience that erosion differently once execution begins.
There is another force that cuts across both of those realities and accelerates the damage.
Delay.
Delays caused by protests, extended evaluations, or incumbent bridge contracts do more than push timelines. They quietly drain hiring readiness in ways most plans are not designed to absorb.
The hidden cost of waiting
When an award is delayed or protested, many teams pause recruiting to avoid unnecessary spend or false starts. On paper, that decision feels prudent. It is often framed as discipline.
In reality, the market does not pause with you.
Candidates who signed contingent offers reassess their options as timelines slip. Those who were interested but undecided move on. Cleared professionals continue to receive outreach and offers, even while your program is stuck in limbo. Silence during this period does not preserve optionality. It creates uncertainty that candidates resolve on their own.
By the time uncertainty lifts, the original pipeline often no longer exists.
I worked with an SMB GovCon that prepared for a transition they expected to begin within sixty days. A protest extended the incumbent for six months. During that time, two Key Personnel exited the market entirely, and several strong pipeline candidates accepted other roles. When the protest was resolved, the program technically restarted, but the hiring plan had to be rebuilt from the ground up.
No one made a mistake. The delay changed the landscape.
Incumbents create a different kind of pressure
Incumbent extensions introduce another layer of complexity that is easy to underestimate. While the incumbent remains in place, hiring can feel premature. Agencies may discourage outreach, program details stay fluid, and subcontractor allocations often remain unsettled. Teams hesitate, not because they are disengaged, but because moving too early feels risky and moving too late feels irresponsible.
At the same time, incumbents continue employing the very talent future programs will need. Those candidates are not waiting passively. They are working, informed, and increasingly selective as timelines slip and priorities shift. The longer an incumbent stays in place, the harder it becomes to compete for that talent once hiring resumes, because candidates are evaluating opportunity through the lens of stability, clarity, and trust rather than role description alone.
Incumbent extensions also change hiring dynamics in a more direct way. In some cases, agencies or primes signal a preference for retaining specific individuals already performing the work, especially when continuity and ramp speed matter more than resetting the team. In other cases, teams recognize that incumbent personnel are among the most likely candidates to be available once hiring resumes. They already understand the mission, know the agency, hold the right clearances, and are comfortable with the logistics of the work site. When teams disengage entirely during delays, they often lose visibility into that talent pool, even though those individuals may represent the lowest execution risk once the program finally moves forward.
Why restarting is harder than starting
When delays lift, teams often assume they can simply turn hiring back on.
That rarely plays out cleanly.
Pipelines that decay over time do not restart on demand. Candidates need to be re engaged. Compensation assumptions may no longer align with the market. Work conditions may have shifted. Conversations that felt settled earlier need to be reopened.
At the same time, pressure mounts. Program Managers are eager to move. Recruiters are asked to deliver quickly. Decisions are compressed into shorter windows than alignment allows.
Hiring accelerates, but confidence does not.
What feels like lost time turns into rushed execution, and the downstream effects often surface later in delivery.
The pattern that is forming
By this point in the series, a clear pattern emerges.
- Time erodes hiring plans.
- Prime and subcontractor dynamics introduce shifting priorities.
- Delays and incumbents quietly drain momentum.
Each of these forces is manageable on its own. Together, they create structural risk that is hard to see until execution is already under pressure.
This is why post award hiring volatility feels so difficult to control. The problem is rarely effort or intent. It is prolonged exposure to uncertainty without a way to absorb it.
A different way to think about readiness
Some teams weather protests and delays better than others.
They do not treat recruiting as something that starts and stops based solely on contract status. They assume uncertainty will occur and plan around it. They stay connected to the market, maintain dialogue with candidates, and manage expectations even when timelines are unclear.
They focus not just on staffing mechanics, but on the human side of uncertainty.
When execution finally begins, they are not restarting. They are continuing.
That distinction matters more than most teams realize.
This article is Part 3 of a 4-part series on post-award hiring volatility for SMB GovCon teams. In Part 4, we explore how recruiting can be structured to stabilize execution when uncertainty is unavoidable.
About the author
Jeff Packard has spent more than a decade supporting talent acquisition for SMB, Mid-Market, and Large GovCon teams, working across capture, post-award ramp, and early and late program execution. Through BizFirst, he also leads recruiting delivery across multiple talent markets, including commercial and enterprise environments, applying the same execution focused discipline used in government programs.
