The Real Cost of a Vacant Position: Why the Empty Chair Runs Deeper Than the Budget
Every business has an empty chair somewhere. A desk gone quiet since someone left. A shift nobody’s covering. A role that’s sat “in progress” on the org chart longer than anyone wants to admit. Some people see that chair as a saving. No wages going out, no harm done. I disagree. Talk to a sales team missing its closer, or a finance function running one person short, and you’ll hear a different story. Missed targets. Team members picking up work that isn’t theirs. Decisions stuck because the person who should be making them hasn’t been hired yet. Sacha and I have both seen what that empty chair actually costs, why some vacancies cost far more than others, and why many organisations only notice the damage once it hits a board meeting. How Is That Empty Chair Affecting Your Business? There’s no single answer to this, but I could look at a P&L compared to a business’s budget or forecast and see it quite clearly. If they’re down on sales headcount, revenue is likely to be down too. From there you start to see the flow-on effects: profitability, growth plans, everything. If they’re missing someone in the support team, you’ll start to see delays or lags in service delivery, and in business processes as well. An empty chair in the finance team means monthly results aren’t being reported as efficiently, and important things get missed. Altogether, it slows down the momentum of the business. So what you’d start to see is declining results or missed targets, and challenges with team morale. Team members feeling overworked, maybe starting to feel a little resentful. That can impact your culture. We recently recruited for an Indigenous health organisation where the cost of a vacancy lands well outside the org chart. They need nurses available to fill shifts, and if they don’t have those nurses, they can’t open the medical facilities the community relies on. This isn’t corporate life, salespeople selling products. It’s nurses helping administer medicine and care to the elderly, to children, to pregnant women, to people in need. The cost of an empty chair can reach a long way past the business it sits in. Why Do Vacant Roles Cost More in Remote and Regional Communities? A vacancy reads as a saving because the salary line is the only part of it that’s easy to see. In a metro business you can hold that assumption for a while. In regional and remote health, it collapses almost immediately, and that’s what makes these roles worth looking at closely. They strip out every option a city business quietly relies on. In a city, if a role goes unfilled, you find a way to cope, spread the work around, get someone in temporarily. Out in a very remote community, that option doesn’t exist. There’s no GP down the road. No clinic to send people to instead. Some of these places you can only get to by four-wheel drive, or by plane, and plenty of the time the phone and internet aren’t reliable either. So if a nurse role sits empty, that’s not a gap that gets absorbed somewhere else. It can mean nobody’s providing services there, full stop. One person is the difference between a community having support or not having it. Why are these roles so hard to fill? Housing’s the big one. Some organisations can offer it, but it might be shared accommodation. There’s not always space for family members, and pets are often not allowed- things that rule people out before they’ve even considered the job itself. Beyond housing, you need someone with the right skills and the resilience for that kind of environment. It requires a certain kind of person, and that’s where behavioural testing earns its place. It tells you about someone’s working style, whether they’re suited to the remote environment and the complexities of the role, rather than just whether they’ve got the right experience. When we take these roles to market, we talk about the challenges as openly as we talk about the rewards, the connection to community, the sense of purpose, all of it. Because if someone takes the job with an unrealistic picture of what it involves, they’re not going to last. Transparency plus the right assessment is what makes these roles stick. Finding someone who fits the environment, not just someone who fits the job description. What Does an Unfilled Position Really Cost Beyond the Salary? When you don’t have the person in the seat, you’re benefiting in that you’re not paying the salary, but the cost is so much greater than that benefit. It depends on the role, but generally, even for a not-for-profit or a healthcare organisation, it comes back to lost revenue, or lost opportunity to deliver services that contribute to revenue. That’s one of the highest costs. Then you start to think about the cost of burnout in the team covering the gap, and the cost of turnover if those people move on. It’s also worth saying that if a role gets filled by the wrong person, you’re often looking at nearly the same flow-on effects as leaving it empty. The cost of a bad hire is widely publicised, two to four times that person’s annual salary, and that holds up. Sometimes we take that too far and get nervous about hiring at all, so we slow right down. I’m a proponent of hire slow, fire fast. Be intentional with your hiring decisions; don’t bring anyone into the business who isn’t aligned with your cultural values, because that creates a big headache of its own. There’s a limit to it though. You can overthink a hiring decision to the detriment of your organisation, and that’s exactly where the cost of the empty seat compounds. This is where quality of hire matters as much as speed. The sweet spot is leveraging tools and methodologies that help you attract and appoint the right person in a time-efficient way, backed by something that
