Over the last few months, I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with agency owners, MDs and senior leaders who all say roughly the same thing.
“We know we need another person.”
The challenge is that very few follow it up with, “Let’s do it.”
Instead, there is often a pause. A delay. A desire to see what happens over the next quarter.
In fairness, it’s not difficult to understand why.
The world feels uncertain. Economic forecasts change weekly. Political instability continues to create questions around investment and growth. Clients are taking longer to sign projects off. Budgets are being scrutinised more heavily than they have been for years.
As a result, many businesses are choosing caution.
The problem is that caution has a cost.
When a role remains vacant, the work doesn’t magically disappear. The projects still need delivering. The clients still need servicing. The proposals still need writing. The problems still need solving.
What actually happens is the workload gets redistributed amongst the people who are already there.
Initially, this can feel manageable.
Everyone pulls together. Teams rally around each other. People step up. Leaders reassure themselves that it’s only temporary.
Then temporary becomes six months.
The account manager starts covering work that should belong to someone else. The project lead is working longer hours. The operations team are firefighting. Senior leaders find themselves dragged back into day-to-day delivery instead of focusing on growth, strategy and the future direction of the business.
The strange thing is that these additional responsibilities rarely appear on anyone’s job description, yet they quietly become part of daily life.
This is where I think many businesses underestimate the impact.
When leaders delay hiring, they often focus on the financial risk of bringing someone in. What receives far less attention is the risk of not bringing someone in.
Employee engagement starts to slip. Stress levels increase. People become frustrated that problems they can clearly see are not being addressed. The strongest performers, who are usually carrying the greatest share of the additional workload, begin questioning whether this is simply how things are going to be permanently.
Ironically, these are often the very people a business can least afford to lose.
I’ve seen it happen repeatedly over the years.
A company delays a hire because they want certainty. The existing team absorbs the pressure for months. Eventually someone resigns. Suddenly the business isn’t replacing one person anymore. It’s replacing two.
The cost hasn’t disappeared. It’s simply been deferred.
There is another consequence that often follows.
Once the pressure becomes too much, the hiring process swings from cautious to urgent almost overnight.
The conversation changes from, “Let’s wait and see,” to, “We need someone yesterday.”
Unfortunately, urgency rarely produces good hiring decisions.
Briefs become rushed. Success criteria become vague. Interview processes get shortened. Businesses start looking for availability instead of suitability. The focus shifts from finding the right person to finding a person.
In other words, they hire fast rather than hire smart.
The irony is that the strongest hiring outcomes I see rarely come from organisations that move the quickest. They come from organisations that start thinking earlier.
The businesses that consistently make good hiring decisions are usually having conversations long before they need someone. They understand where the business is heading, what skills they are likely to need and where pressure is beginning to build. They think about succession, workload and capability before they become business-critical issues.
They aren’t necessarily hiring today.
They’re simply preparing for tomorrow.
That distinction matters.
In fact, one of the biggest misconceptions I come across is that recruitment starts when a vacancy appears. In reality, the best hiring decisions are often made months before a job advert is ever written.
The most successful leaders spend time understanding what the role is actually there to solve. They look at where the business is going, what good looks like twelve months from now and whether the structure they have today will still support the ambitions they have tomorrow.
Finding a person is the easy bit.
Understanding what the business genuinely needs is where the real work happens.
I’m not suggesting every business should immediately launch a recruitment process. There are genuine reasons to be cautious in the current market and many leaders are navigating circumstances that simply weren’t there two or three years ago.
What I am suggesting is that caution and delay are not the same thing.
The best leaders I speak to are still planning. They’re still mapping future capability, identifying pressure points and having conversations before they become urgent. They understand that whilst hiring too quickly can be costly, waiting too long carries a cost of its own.
Not just the financial cost, which is usually the easiest thing to measure, but the cultural cost of asking good people to carry extra weight for prolonged periods, the productivity cost of senior leaders being dragged back into firefighting, the wellbeing impact on teams already operating at full capacity, and ultimately the retention risk that comes when your best people begin to wonder whether this is simply the new normal.
Those costs rarely appear on a spreadsheet, but they are often far more expensive than the salary of the person you were hesitant to hire in the first place.
Because whilst a vacant role might look like a saving on paper, the reality is that somebody else is usually absorbing that cost.
More often than not, it’s the people who have remained loyal, continued delivering and quietly picked up the slack whilst everyone waits for certainty to arrive.
