The Number Nobody Calculates
Most hiring teams know their cost-per-hire. The standard metric, tracked by every TA dashboard, typically lands between EUR 4,000 and EUR 7,500 per role. But cost-per-hire only counts what you spend to fill the seat. It ignores what you lose while the seat sits empty.
The cost of a vacancy is harder to measure and almost always bigger. It includes lost output, overtime paid to the team covering the gap, delayed projects, missed revenue, and the quiet erosion of morale when a three-person team has been carrying a fourth person's work for two months. Gem (2025) reports the average time-to-hire at 44 days. That is 44 days of vacancy cost, running in the background, compounding.
A Simple Formula
There is no universal number because every role is different. But the formula is straightforward:
Daily vacancy cost = (annual salary / 220 working days) x productivity multiplier
The productivity multiplier accounts for the fact that a missing person costs more than their salary. Their colleagues work overtime, projects stall, deadlines shift, and revenue that depends on the role's output slows down. For revenue-generating roles (sales, account management), we use 2x or 3x as a rule of thumb. For operational roles, 1.5x is a conservative floor. Adjust to your own context.
Take a mid-level sales rep earning EUR 55,000. Daily salary: EUR 250. At a 2x multiplier, each open day costs the business EUR 500 in lost output and overhead. Over 44 days, that is EUR 22,000. The recruiter fee to fill the role might be EUR 5,000. The vacancy cost is four times the hiring cost, and nobody is tracking it.
Where the Money Disappears
The daily cost shows up in five places.
1. Lost output. The most obvious one. Work that the missing person would have done either does not get done, gets done slower by overloaded colleagues, or gets done worse by people outside their area of expertise. For every week the role stays open, the team ships less.
2. Team burnout. The remaining team absorbs the workload. For a while, this feels manageable. After four weeks it starts showing: sick days tick up, quality drops, response times slow. After eight weeks, people start updating their own LinkedIn profiles. Gallup (2024) reports that 44% of employees worldwide experience daily stress at work. Adding a colleague's workload on top does not help that number.
3. Delayed projects. Every team has work queued for "when the new person starts." The longer the vacancy, the longer the queue. In product teams, a delayed hire often means a delayed feature, which means a delayed release, which means delayed revenue. The compounding effect is real and hard to reverse.
4. Candidate quality decay. The best candidates move fast. iCIMS (2025) found that 60% of candidates abandon processes that take longer than two weeks. A role open for 44 days is not being evaluated by the same talent pool at day 40 as it was at day 5. The longer you take, the weaker the average applicant, and the more likely you settle for someone you would not have hired in week one.
5. Management time. Hiring managers spend time screening, interviewing, and discussing candidates instead of doing their actual job. Cronofy (2024) reports that 42% of candidates drop out because of scheduling difficulties, which means a meaningful percentage of that manager time is wasted on candidates who never complete the process.
Why Time-to-Hire Is the Metric That Matters Most
Cost-per-hire is a spending metric. It tells you how efficiently you fill roles. Time-to-hire is a business metric. It tells you how long you bleed before the gap is closed. Reducing time-to-hire by ten days on a role with EUR 500 daily vacancy cost saves EUR 5,000 per hire, before you even think about the downstream effects on morale, retention, and project timelines.
The problem is that most of the 44-day average sits in the screening phase. Scheduling phone screens, rescheduling when candidates cancel, waiting for hiring managers to find 30-minute slots, then doing it all again when half the shortlist ghosts. The interview itself takes 20 minutes. The logistics around it take two weeks.
Compressing the Slowest Phase
Async video interviewing removes the scheduling bottleneck entirely. Candidates record answers on their own time. Reviewers watch when they have a clear head. No calendar coordination, no reschedules, no no-shows eating holes in the afternoon.
The time savings are concrete. interviewstream (2025) found that video review is 6x faster than phone screening. For a typical vacancy with 40 candidates to screen, that compresses the screening phase from two weeks to two days. Multiply by the daily vacancy cost and the ROI is immediate.
StormInterview makes this even faster with AI-assisted review. Each response gets a full transcript, a structured score with written reasoning, and a three-sentence summary. The recruiter reads the summary, watches key moments at 1.5x speed, and decides in under three minutes per candidate. A full batch of 40 candidates can be reviewed in a single morning.
The Calculation for Your Team
Run this for your own numbers. Pick your three most recent hires. For each one:
- How many days was the role open from posting to signed offer?
- What is the annual salary?
- Is this a revenue-generating role (use 2x multiplier) or an operational role (use 1.5x)?
- Multiply: (salary / 220) x multiplier x days open.
Add the three numbers. That is how much your last three vacancies cost the business in lost output alone, on top of whatever you paid in recruiter fees, job ads, and tools. For most mid-market teams, the total is surprising.
What You Can Do This Week
You cannot eliminate time-to-hire. Some roles need multiple rounds, stakeholder alignment, and time for the candidate to decide. But you can compress the screening phase, which is where most of the dead time lives.
Pick the role in your pipeline with the most applicants. Move the first screen to async video. Send the link instead of scheduling 20 phone calls. Review the batch in one sitting instead of spreading it across two weeks. Every day you shave off the screening phase is a day of vacancy cost you get back.
Start a free trial of StormInterview and run your next screening round in days instead of weeks. The cost of the tool is a fraction of what the open seat is costing you right now.