One small table in a poll on Friday, and I could hear half the headcount plans in the country being reopened.

The Institute of Directors ran a snap poll, published on 30th October and taken after the Budget on the 28th. Before the Budget, its measure of employment expectations stood at 2, the highest since April last year. Afterwards it sat at minus 6.

I'm not going to pretend one poll settles anything. Snap polls are quick and noisy. But I knew the mood straight away, because it lands in my diary every time a big fiscal event does. It's the sound of a headcount plan being reopened.

Headcount gets approved in one mood and reviewed in another.

What did the Budget do to hiring confidence?

According to the IoD's poll, directors' revenue expectations fell from 28 to 8, the weakest reading since last December. Investment intentions slid from 1 to minus 9, and employment expectations from 2 to minus 6. The IoD's chief economist, Anna Leach, said the Budget had done little to get investment and recruitment plans moving again.

Hiring fell by less than revenue did. My read is that most directors aren't cutting, they're holding, which is a very different thing for anyone sitting on an approved but unfilled role.

And a softer mood doesn't make senior people any easier to find. The ones worth hiring at this level are rarely sitting on the market waiting for your confidence to return, and the ones who are won't hold on while you decide. Waiting feels free. It never is.

Should a snap poll change when you hire a finance lead?

Only if the hire was really a bet on the mood, because a snap poll tells you how directors felt on one afternoon. But a senior finance hire is a decision about what the business must be able to do in six months, and that rarely changes because a chancellor spoke.

Count the months instead. A business that decides in November to bring in a financial controller needs a brief, a search, interviews, an offer and then the wait for the person to leave their current job. In the searches we run, finance managers and controllers are usually on one to three months' notice. And a finance director notice period of three months is hardly rare.

Work it through and the person approved this week arrives in the spring. By then the mood will have changed at least twice, probably more.

Or take the other route and start the search now, quietly, so the notice period runs while the mood settles. Nothing binds you until the offer stage. By then you'll know a good deal more than you do today. And if the mood sours further, you've lost a few interviews, not a salary.

A stop-start search does its own quiet damage as well. Good candidates read a paused process as a verdict on the business, and they hear about it quicker than most employers would believe. Pull a search in December and restart it in February, and the strongest people you spoke to have usually gone elsewhere.

Nobody has ever landed a better controller by waiting for a better poll.

Hire against the job, not the week

The finance directors I rate most do something unfashionable. They write down what the hire is for before anyone has a view on the economy, then they keep it in a drawer.

Month-end takes eleven working days. The board pack is always late. And nobody can say what the cash position is without ringing three people.

If those things are still true on Monday, the role still exists, whatever happened on Friday.

They also agree the stopping conditions in a calm week. Lose a contract above a certain value, or watch the order book drop below an agreed line, and the hire pauses. Short of that, it carries on. It sounds fussy, but it stops a plan being rewritten every time a headline lands, and it means any pause has a reason people can repeat to the team without wincing.

But stopping conditions only work if somebody owns them. Usually that's the finance director, and where there isn't one yet it's the managing director, wearing a very tired expression.

It also helps to say out loud who signs off the shortlist and how fast.

Searches rarely stall on the market. They stall on a diary where three busy people can't find the same hour. Meanwhile the best candidate takes another offer in the gap.

Money matters too, obviously. Settle the band early, because a search without a number just drifts, and our finance director salary page is a decent place to start before you ring anyone.

What does waiting cost a finance team?

Waiting costs a slower close, colleagues covering the gap and candidates who go elsewhere, because the work carries on regardless of the poll. Month-end still closes, the audit still arrives, and the budget round for next year starts about now. The calendar has no interest in sentiment. And the board still expects its pack on the same day as ever.

When a seat stays empty, the existing team covers it, usually for longer than anyone promised, and the people covering tend to start looking at job adverts of their own.

None of that is a reason to hire into a panic. It is a reason to count the empty seat as honestly as the full one. I've watched people cost a salary to the pound and ignore the three extra weeks a close takes while the vacancy sits there. Those weeks never reach a spreadsheet.

Or look at it from the candidate's side. A controller who has decided to leave doesn't stop looking because a poll dipped. They're weighing up the job in front of them, the person they met, and how quickly you moved.

One Budget moved the mood, and plenty of plans were reopened. It won't move your month-end, and it certainly won't shorten anybody's notice period.

If there's a finance manager role you've been holding while the mood settles, send it to our finance recruitment specialists and we'll tell you straight how long the search and the notice period will really take.