The Cost of Waiting: What Happens When a Critical Hire Stays Open for 30, 60 or 90 Days?
Most businesses do not panic when a role has been open for a few weeks. The team usually covers the gap, a hiring manager picks up some of the workload and everyone assumes the right person will turn up soon enough.
In many cases, that is completely reasonable. Important hires should not be rushed simply because a vacancy exists, and there is a big difference between taking the right amount of time and allowing a search to drift.
The problem is when 30 days becomes 60, and 60 becomes 90. At that point, the cost of the vacancy can start to look very different.
Not every open role can be reduced to a simple financial number. A salesperson being absent does not mean every pound of their target has automatically been lost, just as a marketing hire being delayed does not mean revenue disappears overnight. A leadership vacancy may have more impact on decision-making, momentum and team performance than on a neat monthly revenue figure.
That said, an empty seat is rarely completely free.
The first 30 days: usually manageable
For many businesses, the first month is a perfectly sensible period to test the market. The role goes live, internal Talent starts searching, hiring managers speak to their networks and applications begin coming in. Existing members of the team can usually absorb some additional work in the short term without it causing too many problems.
There is nothing inherently wrong with taking 30 days to hire somebody, particularly if the role is specialist or senior. Moving too quickly can create a different set of problems if the business hires somebody simply because they are available.
The more useful question at this stage is whether the search is producing the right signals. Are relevant candidates applying? Are the people you are approaching interested? Is the salary attracting the level of person you expected? Are candidates progressing through interviews?
If those answers are broadly positive, there may be no reason to change course. If they are not, another 30 days of exactly the same activity may not suddenly produce a different result.
At 60 days, the hidden costs start to become clearer
Two months into a search, the vacancy is often being felt beyond the hiring team. Someone is probably covering parts of the role, managers may be spending more time sourcing, reviewing CVs and interviewing, and projects can start being delayed because there simply is not enough capacity to deliver them.
For commercial positions, the impact can be easier to see. A territory may not be properly covered, prospective customers may not be receiving enough attention or opportunities may be progressing more slowly than they otherwise would. That does not mean all of the revenue has disappeared forever, but it does mean the vacancy is beginning to have a commercial consequence.
The other cost at this stage is internal time. Recruitment tends to be measured in advertising spend or external agency fees, but the time of a Sales Director, CMO, founder or hiring manager has a value too. If several people have already spent hours sourcing, interviewing and discussing candidates, hiring directly has not been free simply because there has been no recruitment invoice.
This is one of the reasons we created our Recruitment Cost Calculator. It is designed to make some of those less visible costs easier to quantify, including vacancy time, internal resource, ramp-up and, where relevant, lost productivity or revenue impact.
At 90 days, is recruitment still the problem?
If a role has been open for three months and the right person still has not been found, it is probably worth asking some more difficult questions.
The salary may be below where the market is. The brief may be asking for a combination of experience that is simply too narrow. Candidates may like the business but not be convinced by the role itself. The interview process might be too long, the remit may be changing as people interview, or different stakeholders internally could have very different views of what they are actually hiring for.
Sometimes the issue is simply reach. The people most suitable for the role may not be actively applying for jobs and therefore are unlikely to appear through an advert.
Whatever the reason, continuing with exactly the same approach for another month is unlikely to fix it. That does not automatically mean calling a recruitment agency is the answer, but it does mean something probably needs to change.
We have written separately about the wider question of whether recruitment agencies are actually more expensive than hiring directly. The answer is not always straightforward, because the visible agency fee is only one part of the overall hiring cost.
More candidates does not always make the search easier
A tougher job market can create the impression that hiring should automatically become easier. In some areas, that will absolutely be true. More candidate availability can give employers more choice and reduce some of the pressure they felt during a tighter market.
In specialist recruitment, though, more applications can sometimes just mean more applications to work through. A business may receive hundreds of CVs and still struggle to find someone with the specific product experience, market knowledge, customer relationships or performance history it actually needs.
The challenge is not necessarily finding somebody who wants a new job. It is finding somebody you want to hire, who also wants your job.
That distinction matters, particularly once a role has already been open for several months.
The cost will be different for every role
This is also why we are wary of claims that an empty role automatically costs a business a fixed amount every day. There are simply too many variables.
A £70,000 marketing role with no direct revenue target is very different from a £120,000 salesperson carrying a £1.2m quota. A replacement hire where the workload is already being covered will have a different impact from a newly created role that is central to a company’s growth plans.
There is also ramp-up time to consider. Filling the vacancy does not mean the problem disappears on someone’s first day. A salesperson could take several months to build pipeline and understand the market, while a senior leader may need time to assess the team and start making changes.
That means the real cost is not just how long it takes to hire. It is also how long it takes before the business gets the impact it originally wanted from creating the role in the first place.
When should you change your approach?
We do not think there should be an arbitrary rule that says a role must be handed to a recruiter after 30, 60 or 90 days. Instead, the search itself should tell you when something needs to change.
If relevant candidates are entering the process and progress is being made, stay the course. If strong people consistently decline because of salary, listen to what the market is telling you. If you keep reaching final stage but nobody feels quite right, revisit the brief. If you are seeing the same candidates repeatedly, you may need to broaden how or where you are searching.
And if a hiring manager is spending a significant part of their week trying to source somebody instead of doing the job they were hired to do, it is worth putting a value against that time too.
The important thing is recognising when patience has turned into inertia.
Put your own numbers against it
There is no universal answer to what a vacant role costs, which is exactly why we built our Recruitment Cost Calculator.
Rather than us deciding the value of an open position for you, the calculator allows you to enter your own salary, commercial expectations, time-to-hire and internal resource assumptions. Every input is adjustable, so the result reflects your own business rather than a generic benchmark.
You may discover that leaving the search internally for another month is still comfortably the right decision. You may also discover that the cost of waiting is already considerably higher than you thought.
Neither answer is wrong. The useful part is understanding the difference before 30 days quietly becomes 60, and 60 becomes 90.
