Employment Testing Blog

Job Vacancy Costs: Top Employee Turnover Costs Part 2

The first component of employee turnover costs is "Separation Costs", which was outlined in a recent blog post.

Now let's dive into "Vacancy Costs", the second component of employee turnover costs.  After your former employee vacates his/her position, you still need to get their job done, right?  So until you fill the position with the new hire, you have two options to make sure nothing gets missed:

• Temporary Help:  Temps will be able to quickly fill the role, particularly if it is an admin or clerical type position.  However, that help can come at a steep cost. Temp workers wages can be 25% to 100% higher than that of an equivalent full-time employee.

• Overtime for current employees:  Somebody's still gotta do the work and they ain't gonna do it for free.   Whether you are paying overtime or not, the tasks of your current employees will not be effficiently completed if they are now assuming the responsibilities of the departed employee.

So until you can replace the terminated team member, there will be some vacancy costs. They might be hard monetary costs, if using a temp or overtime, or productivity (and efficiency) costs if current staff is absorbing the new responsibilities.  However you want to label it, it's still a "Vacancy Cost".

Part 3 of this series will deal with "Recruitment Costs," which will include the all-important (to us) topic of pre-employment skills testing.

Would you like a sample of our pre-employment tests?  Just visit Try a Test to get started!