The Real Cost of Waiting Another Month to Hire

Every October, a similar conversation takes place with clients who've been meaning to fill a senior role for months. The role's been sitting there, the team's been absorbing the gap, and the plan has always been to get to it ‘once things settle down.’ By the time October arrives, the maths on that plan has usually stopped working.

The average Australian hiring process — from writing the job description to a candidate accepting an offer — is around five weeks, with close to a third of businesses reporting six weeks or longer particularly for senior roles. That's before a notice period comes into play, and for anyone senior, four weeks is closer to the minimum than the maximum. Some contracts run considerably longer.

Add it up and a search that starts in October, run well, points to a January start. A search that starts in November points to February. Neither is a disaster on its own, but the gap between the two is one month of decisions made without the right person in the room, one month of a stretched team covering a role they weren't hired to cover, and one month closer to the business's busiest trading period with the same shortfall it has today.

None of this is an argument for rushing. A hurried senior hire, made because the calendar forced the decision, tends to cost more than the delay it was meant to avoid — the wrong appointment in a critical role is a harder problem to fix than an empty seat. The argument is for starting properly now, while there's still enough runway to run a real process: genuine market mapping rather than a quick look at who's already looking, structured interviews rather than a single conversation and a gut call, reference checks that ask real questions rather than tick boxes.

There's a second piece to factor in, particularly for a business setting its 2027 plan over the next few weeks. A role that's been open all year is easy to keep deferring because the business has adapted to running without it. That adaptation isn't free — it shows up as decisions that wait longer than they should, as work continually redistributed onto people who weren't meant to carry it, as a gap the rest of the leadership team has simply learned to work around. Filling it now, before the year turns over, means 2027 starts with the team it's actually meant to have, rather than the team the business happened to end up with.

If there's a role on the list for ‘early next year,’ the honest test is whether starting the search this week gets a properly run process with a realistic January or February start — or whether waiting another month turns that into March or later.