I had one of those months…

Six things in my house broke in less than two weeks!

The plumbing went first, then the stove, then the AC...
After that the pool, the toilets, and something in the electrical panel just to finish the job.

Thousands of dollars and a lot of hours I did not have.

And the thing I keep coming back to is not the money or the run of bad luck.

Every single time something broke, I knew exactly who to call.

None of those people were strangers.

The appliance guy is a long time family friend, someone who has been in that industry as long as I’ve known him.

The AC was handled by an HVAC expert, who I got to know several weeks earlier, and it made all the difference.

So each time, the sequence was the same….Something breaks. Quick moment of panic.

Then a call to someone who picks up, knows the house or knows me, and comes out.

Now run the other version. Same two weeks, BUT I am starting from zero every time.

⏳ Searching.
😒 Reading reviews I do not trust.
😖 Calling four numbers to find one that answers.
🫠 And eventually waiting on someone who has never seen the place and has no particular reason to move me up the list.

Same problems.

But considerably more money, because the person you find in an emergency, prices it like an emergency. And two weeks that would have looked nothing like the two weeks I actually had.

In the end, It simply came down to the relationships I had formed & kept.

Not a plan I made or a job I did. Just people I knew, because relationships make all the difference.

I have watched the same thing play out in businesses for over a decade, and I never connected it to my own house until this month.

🚩 A key person resigns with no warning.
🚩 A project lands that you cannot staff.
🚩 A client comes on faster than expected.
🚩 Somebody goes out on leave.

None of that is unusual.

What is different, company to company; is what happens in the immediate 12 - 24 hours that follows the event.

Some leaders have a name in mind before they finish reading the resignation email. Not a plan. A person.
Maybe it’s someone they had coffee with in the spring, or stayed close with after a search that did not work out.

And others start from nothing. Write the job description. Post it. Then wait…

Meanwhile, their competitor already made the call.

Both of them got the same bad news on the same day. BUT one of them did the legwork earlier in the year.

Because it never feels urgent.

Nothing is broken. There is no open role.

Reaching out to someone you might want to hire eventually, with nothing to offer them, feels like a strange use of an afternoon when there are real problems sitting on your desk.

Trust me, I get it.
But I did not build those relationships because I saw six failures coming.

I built them because, I am at a point in my life where those relationships matter more than they ever have, and I have come to believe that putting in the groundwork before you need anything is the whole secret.

Not for wanting a specific problem. But just knowing people, ahead of the moment you need them.

That is really the whole thing.
The work is small and boring and it never pays off on the day you do it.

It only pays off later, at the exact moment you needed it to.

So what does this actually look like when it comes to hiring?

It is not a system you have to build or a tool you have to buy. It is four moments in the year where you reach out to people you would want on your team one day, and say nothing more than hello.

The timing is not random.

Each of these is a point in the year where people are more likely to be thinking about their own situation, which means your message lands differently than it would in the middle of a busy stretch.

🏆 Four touch points a year. That is the whole system.

Four messages. Nobody is being pitched, and you are not asking for anything.

You are just staying in reach so that when something breaks, there is a name in your head instead of a blank page.

None of this is complicated.
It is just easy to skip, forever, because nothing is on fire.

Think of the last person you interviewed who was genuinely good but did not end up joining.

Send them a message. Nothing about a job. Just that you thought of them and hope things are going well.

Two minutes. It might do nothing. But you have put a name back in reach, and the whole point of this is that you will not know when it mattered until it does.

Everything works until it doesn't, usually all at once.

What separates a bad week from a disaster is almost never how well you handle the moment.

It is what you set up before it, back when there was no reason to.

In this video, I break down the four major hiring shifts redefining the 2026 job market. You will see how AI in hiring is actually playing out in practice, why most companies failed to implement effective AI recruiting systems, and why in-person interviews, compliance, and human-in-the-loop recruiting are becoming critical again.

See you next Tuesday,

Jared Black
Founder, The Hire-archy

P.S. Ever had one of those weeks where everything broke at once? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.