February 2, 2026

Hiring in a Storm? Read This First

When It Rains, It Floods… At Work Too

Southwest England just got slapped with another yellow rain alert. The ground's already soaked from Storm Chandra, so this downpour isn’t just inconvenient—it’s dangerous. The rain can’t soak in, so it piles on top. Cue more flooding, more chaos.

Sound familiar? Because this is every high-growth tech firm with broken hiring practices trying to scale.

You’ve already got messy infrastructure—unclear job specs, reactive hiring, siloed teams. Then, under pressure, you stack more urgency on top: “We need that Platform Engineer yesterday!” And just like the Devon ditches, the system bursts.

Founders, This Is Your Met Office Warning

It’s not the rain. It’s the readiness. And in your business, readiness means having a proper, robust, flexible hiring architecture that doesn’t collapse when the next storm—aka funding round, roadmap shift, or resignation—hits.

I see this all the time in fintech, greentech and heritage-tech crossovers. Founders and COOs fighting the last fire while pouring gasoline on the next one with rushed hires and brittle systems. The job gets filled (yay), but the problems worsen (oh dear).

Here’s what to ask before the storm hits:

• Does everyone agree what ‘good’ looks like for this role?
• Are we set up to assess that properly?
• Will this hire shore up the system or make us more fragile?

Stop Plugging Leaks With Panic Hires

Desperate hiring is like slapping duct tape on a cracked ceiling while it pours outside. It might hold for a week. Then it rips, and now you need a builder and a new laptop.

Here’s how I see it play out most often:

• Reactive Job Specs: The role was defined by whatever crisis happened last quarter.
• Rushed Processes: No time to test properly, so you hire on vibe.
• Onboarding Chaos: Undefined goals. They flounder. You resent. They bounce.

All of this comes back to one thing: pressure amplifies the cracks you already had. Storms don’t create poor hiring—they expose it.

Would You Build a Dam Out of Duct Tape?

Let’s run with the flood analogy (because why not?):

• Foundations = your hiring frameworks
• Pipes and Drains = the communication flow between People, Product and Ops
• Your Resilience = how you hire and grow without panic

If your foundations are shallow and your pipes are clogged, the moment it rains—aka your CTO quits or funding lands—you’re scrambling with sandbags and spreadsheets.

This is how a promising scale-up turns into a soggy mess of missed deadlines, team burnout, and culture drift.

Fix the Ground, Before the Rain

Here’s how the smartest teams prep for the flood before it pours:

1. Design Your Roles, Don’t Just React

Not: “We need a DevOps person.”

But: “How does our infrastructure need to evolve—and what type of system-thinker with cloud experience fits that evolution?”

2. Build Hiring Playbooks That Actually Work

Stop crying everytime someone says ‘process.’ You don’t need bureaucracy, you need clarity:

• What questions signal quality?
• Who’s evaluating what?
• What would terrible answers look like too?

3. Think Like an Architect, Not a Firefighter

Your hiring plan should absorb pressure, not pass it downstream. If you’re always reacting, you’re always exhausted. Stop being the roof drip-bucket guy.

Build systems so when the hire comes in, they slot into something coherent—but still flexible enough for real life (we’re not doing Agile cosplay here).

4. Bring in Experts Who Know the Terrain

Not a subtle plug—but real talk: part of why Xist4 exists is because we know what bad infrastructure looks like hiding inside glossy interview slides.

I’ve helped scale-ups dodge bad hires not because I had a flash CV, but because I saw their broken pipes and sorted it before the rain came. If that’s not worth a chat, I don’t know what is.

Closing Thoughts From the Eye of the Storm

If your region’s waterlogged, you don’t pray it stops raining. You fix the roads, clear the gullies, reinforce the levees.

Same goes for your org. If hiring stress is flooding your week, don’t just beg the market for better talent. Get your systems right first.

The best hiring decisions don’t happen in sunshine. They’re forged during storms—when you either fold, or engineer something stronger.

Fix the ground. Before the next downpour.

Back to news