The Cost of Open Jobs: $1 Trillion

Every month, unfilled roles are costing employers and the US economy $1 trillion in missed opportunities.

When a job goes unfilled, work doesn’t get done. That has a cost in revenue: sales that don’t get made, products that don’t get built, and other opportunities lost. And employers are likely to find it harder and  harder to hire talent because of an aging population and rapid changes in skills.

In this research with Fiverr, Lightcast looked at the revenue cost to US employers of failing to fill jobs. 

• On average, an unfilled job costs an employer $25,000 per month in revenue. There were roughly 3.7 million new unfilled jobs each month in 2023.

• In some industries, the cost of unfilled openings is much higher. Computer and math occupations cost employers more than $42,000 per month in revenue.

• Across the economy unfilled jobs cost employers $1.08 trillion in lost opportunities. If all of those open jobs were filled, the US economy would be 15% larger than it is.

Factoring in the lost revenue of unfilled jobs makes the current talent crunch even more pressing for employers. Investing in new ways of finding and developing talent may be cheaper than the opportunity cost of doing nothing.

Too often, employers look at a job that takes too long to fill as a savings: yes, they need the person, but at least they’re not paying the salary.

But that fails to consider what those workers would have been doing, had they been hired: making sales, serving customers, and bringing in money in general. When necessary work doesn’t get done, that’s a drag on both businesses and the overall economy.

So what can you do?

With an aging population and the rapid pace of skill change, the tight labor market isn’t going anywhere. In fact, employers will be living in an era of permanent scarcity. But there are data-driven strategies companies can use to find and develop talent faster. For example:

Make sure the job is properly defined. Job architecture can make a big difference in hiring. If you send clear signals about what you want, you’ll have more success finding the people you need.

Tap into new talent pools. Focusing on skills, rather than credentials, can attract people who might not even have applied in the past. Skills-based hiring can be good for both talent acquisition and diversity.

In addition, remote work and other flexible arrangements may give you the opportunity to seek out talent beyond your region. For at least some roles, your true talent pool may be national or even global.

Develop your own talent pool. There are a number of strategies companies can use to build their own  talent. For example, a firm can identify workers in roles with similar skills–”adjacent jobs”-- and train them to move into new challenges. Apprenticeships and other nontraditional approaches can expand the talent pipeline.

Employers need to grow–and they need skilled workers to do it. By adopting new strategies they can find workers faster, and pick up more of these lost business opportunities.