What an unfilled leadership position sets in motion

What the usual calculation misses

The cost of an open position is usually worked out like this: annual revenue divided by headcount and by working days, multiplied by the days the role stands empty. The method goes back to John Sullivan, who published it in 2005. Germany has no official or academically settled formula for this, and the online calculators that come up under the term all belong to staffing providers.

The direct cost of searching turns out to be far smaller than the calculation suggests. The Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung puts it at an average of 870 euros per successful hire for the years 2010 to 2022.

The larger bill is run up inside the company while the position stays open.

What a vacancy sets off inside the team

The DGB-Index Gute Arbeit (a survey by the German Trade Union Confederation) questioned 6,985 employees between January and April 2024. Of those, 46 percent work in areas with noticeable staff shortages. Among the people affected, 76 percent take on additional tasks, 60 percent have to work faster, and 57 percent each work overtime or adjust their working hours.

DGB-Index Gute Arbeit, Report 2024, with a focus on securing skilled labour. The publisher is the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, which represents the employee side. The survey is representative and its method is documented. The figure covers staff shortages in general, not an open leadership position specifically.

The arithmetic here works differently from what the formula describes. One open position creates further open positions. Letting the extra load run for months risks losing people from the very team the new manager is meant to lead.

Employers describe it in much the same way. In the DIHK-Fachkräftereport for 2025 and 2026, a survey of the German Chambers of Commerce covering around 22,000 companies, 55 percent name the added load on staff as an expected consequence of the skills shortage. 36 percent cannot fill open positions, at least in part, and among small and medium-sized companies the figure is above 40 percent.

The wider economic picture

The Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft put the loss in economic output caused by missing skilled workers at 49 billion euros for 2024, equal to 1.1 percent of production potential. The calculation was based on around 573,000 skilled workers who were not available. For 2027 the same study expects 74 billion euros.

A more current view comes from the gap itself. For March 2026 the Kompetenzzentrum Fachkräftesicherung (KOFA, a project of the Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft) reports around 357,000 positions that cannot be filled, on paper, with suitably qualified unemployed people. That is 32.5 percent of all open positions. The number of open positions stands at 1.15 million in the first quarter of 2026 according to the IAB-Stellenerhebung (the IAB job vacancy survey), 8 percent below the previous quarter.

So the gap is getting smaller. For a single senior position that changes little, because the question there is not how many positions are open across the country.

What a long vacancy in a qualified role signals

The cost of vacancy calculation usually ends in a call to fill the role faster. A finding from accounting research points the other way.

Ciao-Wei Chen and Laura Yue Li analysed 30 million job postings from 3,540 US companies across 38,115 firm quarters, covering August 2007 to December 2018. The work was published in 2023 in the peer-reviewed journal Review of Accounting Studies.

The result splits by qualification level. For low-skilled positions, a short time to fill goes together with higher future profitability. For high-skilled positions the relationship turns around, and a longer time to fill predicts higher future profitability. In both cases the effect size is around five to six percent of average quarterly ROA per standard deviation.

Chen, Ciao-Wei / Li, Laura Yue: Is hiring fast a good sign? Review of Accounting Studies 28, pages 1316 to 1353, 2023. The data is from the United States, and whether it transfers to the German market has not been tested.

A quick appointment that is open again twelve months later moves the vacancy back by a year and adds the work of a second onboarding.

Two figures that pull against each other

That leaves the company with two values that both grow over time, at different speeds.

• The ongoing load: extra work in the team, postponed projects, strong performers leaving. This figure grows every month and picks up speed once the shortage becomes the normal state.
• The risk of the wrong appointment: it rises as soon as pressure shortens the selection. A manager hired in a hurry costs the full cycle a second time.

Weighing one against the other leads to a schedule with fixed response deadlines and a selection that goes deep enough to avoid the second bill.