{"id":17125,"date":"2026-08-17T23:00:32","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T23:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scouttalent.com\/?p=17125"},"modified":"2026-08-18T06:15:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T06:15:58","slug":"the-real-cost-of-a-vacant-position","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scouttalent.com\/us\/blog\/the-real-cost-of-a-vacant-position\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real Cost of a Vacant Position: Why the Empty Chair Runs Deeper Than the Budget"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every business has an empty chair somewhere. A desk gone quiet since someone left. A shift nobody\u2019s covering. A role that\u2019s sat \u201cin progress\u201d on the org chart longer than anyone wants to admit.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019ll hear a different story. Missed targets. Team members picking up work that isn\u2019t theirs. Decisions stuck because the person who should be making them hasn\u2019t been hired yet.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

How Is That Empty Chair Affecting Your Business?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

There\u2019s no single answer to this, but I could look at a P&L compared to a business\u2019s budget or forecast and see it quite clearly. If they\u2019re 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

If they\u2019re missing someone in the support team, you\u2019ll 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\u2019t being reported as efficiently, and important things get missed. Altogether, it slows down the momentum of the business.<\/span><\/p>\n

So what you\u2019d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t have those nurses, they can\u2019t open the medical facilities the community relies on. This isn\u2019t corporate life, salespeople selling products. It\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why Do Vacant Roles Cost More in Remote and Regional Communities?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

A vacancy reads as a saving because the salary line is the only part of it that\u2019s 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\u2019s what makes these roles worth looking at closely. They strip out every option a city business quietly relies on.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t exist. There\u2019s 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\u2019t reliable either. So if a nurse role sits empty, that\u2019s not a gap that gets absorbed somewhere else. It can mean nobody\u2019s providing services there, full stop. One person is the difference between a community having support or not having it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why are these roles so hard to fill? Housing\u2019s the big one. Some organisations can offer it, but it might be shared accommodation. There\u2019s not always space for family members, and pets are often not allowed- things that rule people out before they\u2019ve 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\u2019s where behavioural testing earns its place. It tells you about someone\u2019s working style, whether they\u2019re suited to the remote environment and the complexities of the role, rather than just whether they\u2019ve got the right experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

When we <\/span>take these roles to market<\/span><\/a>, 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\u2019re 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Does an Unfilled Position Really Cost Beyond the Salary?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

When you don\u2019t have the person in the seat, you\u2019re benefiting in that you\u2019re 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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s also worth saying that if a role gets filled by the wrong person, you\u2019re 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\u2019s 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\u2019m a proponent of hire slow, fire fast. Be intentional with your hiring decisions; don\u2019t bring anyone into the business who isn\u2019t aligned with your cultural values, because that creates a big headache of its own. There\u2019s a limit to it though. You can overthink a hiring decision to the detriment of your organisation, and that\u2019s exactly where the cost of the empty seat compounds.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is where <\/span>quality of hire<\/span><\/a> 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 tells you this is likely the right person for the role.<\/span><\/p>\n

How Do You Calculate the Cost of a Vacancy?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

There\u2019s no single formula that applies to every business, but a simple version most organisations can use looks like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

Cost of Vacancy = (Lost Revenue or Output) + (Overtime and Coverage Costs) + (Recruitment Costs) + (Productivity Loss) minus (Salary Saved)<\/b><\/p>\n

Broken down:<\/span><\/p>\n