Avoiding High Employer Costs for Vacant Positions

For many companies, the high cost of leaving a position vacant for an extended period of time is becoming a matter of great concern. More than 50 percent of employers report having open positions that they are finding it difficult to fill. Many of these positions remain vacant for more than 12 weeks.

High employer costs for vacant positions are a real concern for many employers. One such cost is simply the expense of trying to find a qualified candidate for the position. If you are spending a significant amount of time recruiting applicants and interviewing potential candidates, this can take time away from day-to-day operations.

In addition, having positions remain vacant for an extended period of time can affect the morale of the rest of your employees. They may wonder why you are having such a hard time finding anyone to fill the position. They may not realize how much effort you are putting into this task, and instead assume that you just do not care about hiring someone for the job.

Vacant positions can also significantly decrease the productivity of your entire organization, especially when these are critical positions that come with a lot of responsibilities. When these jobs are unfilled, their duties will not be performed in a timely fashion.

Since other employees will have to step up and do the work, this means that their regular duties will be put on the back burner. This can cause a cascade throughout the entire organization, eventually causing employees in different departments or branches to be affected as well. The ripple effect from even a single vacant position can be significant and last for months.

Even after a position is filled, it can take a while for things to get caught up and back to normal. The longer that a position remains empty, the longer it will take for the rest of your employees to catch up and get things back on track. Even an extra day or two can cause real difficulties.

In addition, even after a new person has been hired, it can take them a while to master their new responsibilities and get up to speed. This means that other employees will have to take time away from their regular tasks to assist the new hire in learning these skills. The training process can often increase costs for a company, since other employees will be affected.

When positions remain vacant for extended periods of time, this can affect the company’s position in the marketplace as well. If orders take longer to fill, customers may end up taking their business elsewhere. Over time, this can cause a company’s reputation to suffer.

Other employer costs for vacant positions include lost orders, overtaxed resources, and increased employee turnover. If a customer knows that an order will take an extra week or two to complete, for example, they may decide that the delay is not worth it. While your oldest and most loyal customers may stick with you, it can be hard to attract new customers if they know that they cannot expect timely service.

When your employees are asked to do more work with fewer resources, they may eventually decide to leave your organization and seek a more pleasant work environment. This just exacerbates the problem, since now you will have even more vacancies to fill. Over time, the problems caused by vacant positions can snowball rapidly.

As you can see, the employer costs for vacant positions can cause real problems for a company. Organizations need to be aggressive in filling such vacancies to avoid these very costly problems.  And if they cannot do it themselves, they should be contacting a recruitment agency to help them.  There is money to be spent there, but the money lost while having a position vacant, far outweighs the money spent on an employment agency to help you fill it.

About ARC Group©

ARC Group©, the parent company of Recruitment Intelligence™, has been an industry front runner in the last 30 years in the full-time, contract and contract-to-hire staffing and consulting industries.  Awarded to the South Florida, Jacksonville and Minnesota’s Business Journal’s collection of “Top 25 Executive Search & Consulting Firms” we have a national presence, and provide a service throughout the US, including Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, Jacksonville, Minnesota, Chicago and Washington.