Tools
What is the open seat costing you today?
Pick a discipline, adjust the inputs, and see the daily and cumulative cost of the vacancy next to what a properly resourced search would cost. Built for critical facilities, construction and AI infrastructure roles.
Calculator
Estimate downtime and hiring cost.
Nothing is stored or submitted. Every figure updates as you type.
Cost of vacancy per day
$1,954
1 seat at $1,954 per seat per day.
- Already incurred
- 30 days open so far
- $58,627
- Still to come
- 30 modeled delay days
- $58,627
- Total vacancy cost
- Open time plus modeled delay
- $117,254
- Search investment
- 1 seat in scope
- $0
- Cost of the modeled delay
- Compare against the search investment
- $58,627
- Search investment equals
- Vacancy exposure compared with search investment
- Add investment
How the daily figure is built
- Lost output: $769 (1.6x fully loaded daily salary)
- Coverage and overtime: $285
- Schedule and operational risk: $900
Estimate only. Use your own assumptions. This is not a forecast of your results.
Why vacancy cost is understated in infrastructure hiring
Most hiring plans price outside support and ignore the delay. In a data center program the delay has a schedule attached to it: commissioning scripts, switchgear coordination, turnover packages, capacity handover. When the seat responsible for that work is empty, the milestone moves and the cost lands somewhere else in the budget where nobody attributes it to hiring.
How to use the output in a funding conversation
Take the daily figure, apply your own delay assumption, and compare it to the search investment line. If the exposure costs more than the engagement, the decision is no longer about recruiting budget. That comparison unblocks more requisitions than any candidate pipeline slide.
What the model deliberately leaves out
Attrition risk on the team covering the gap, quality-of-work degradation, deferred preventive maintenance, and the compounding effect of two open seats in the same discipline. Those are real and they are hard to defend numerically, so the estimate stays conservative without them.
FAQ
Common questions.
- What is cost of vacancy?
- The money an open seat costs you every day it stays open: work that does not get done, overtime and coverage absorbed by the existing team, and the schedule or operational risk carried while the role is empty. It is a running cost, not a one-time expense.
- How is the daily figure calculated?
- Fully loaded daily salary times a role-specific output multiple, plus coverage hours at your overtime rate, plus a per-day schedule and operational risk figure for that discipline. Multiply by open seats to get the daily total.
- Why is downtime risk higher for some roles?
- A commissioning agent or construction project manager sits on the critical path to energization, so a day lost moves a milestone date. A GPU cluster engineer sits next to accelerated compute that bills whether or not it is used. Both carry more per-day risk than a role with substitutable coverage.
- What delay assumption should we use?
- Use your own planning assumption for the role, market and hiring process. The calculator does not publish fill-time benchmarks or promise a hiring outcome.
- Is this a guarantee of savings?
- No. The calculator is a planning estimate that helps compare the cost of waiting against the cost of resourcing a search properly. It is not a forecast and it does not promise a hiring outcome.
- What do we do with the number?
- Use it to fund the search, defend a compensation exception, or decide whether to run intelligence first. Most stalled requisitions are stalled because the cost of the delay was never priced.
Seen the number? Let's reduce the exposure.
Tell us the roles, the market and the milestone dates. You'll get a diagnostic and a plan, not a pitch.