Vacancy

What is a vacancy?

A vacancy (or job vacancy) is an unfilled position in a company's structure that the employer is looking to hire for. The role is already planned and budgeted, but nobody holds it right now. The word comes from the Latin vacans, meaning "empty".

In everyday use, people often call the job ad itself a vacancy. Strictly speaking, these are two different things: the vacancy is the position, while the job posting is how you tell candidates about it.

Types of vacancies

Why vacancies open

• Resignations and dismissals. People leave, and high employee turnover keeps reopening the same roles.
• Promotions and transfers. An employee moves into a new role and leaves the previous one empty.
• Growth. The business expands under its workforce plan and adds roles.
• Restructuring. A new structure creates positions or reshapes existing ones.
• Long absences. Parental leave or long-term sickness leaves a role temporarily vacant.

Vacancy vs new position

A vacancy is a position that already exists in the structure and the budget. A new position has to be justified and approved first: the duties are written up in a job description, the pay level is set and the role is added to the structure. Only then does it become a vacancy and hiring can start.

Tracking vacancies is not just for recruiters. It gives you the vacancy rate and the gap between actual and planned headcount, which shows where teams are short of people.

How to fill a vacancy in 6 steps

1. Confirm the need. Check whether the work can be redistributed, and get the vacancy approved by the manager and finance.
2. Define the role. Write down the tasks, must-have and nice-to-have requirements, salary range and work format.
3. Choose your channels. Internal moves, an employee referral program, job boards, your careers site or social media.
4. Publish the job ad. Lead with what the person will do and get, not with a list of requirements.
5. Run the selection. CV screening, a structured interview and, where it makes sense, a test task with the same criteria for everyone.
6. Make the offer and plan the start. Send the offer letter and prepare onboarding in advance.

Vacancy metrics

Vacancies in the UK

Under the Equality Act 2010, job adverts and selection must not discriminate on protected characteristics such as age, sex, race or disability, so wording like "young and energetic" is a risk. Before a new hire starts, UK employers also have to run a right to work check. For the bigger picture, the Office for National Statistics publishes monthly estimates of job vacancies by industry, which helps benchmark how hard a role will be to fill.

In PeopleForce, a vacancy follows its whole path in one place. A manager submits a vacancy request, it goes through the approval chain your company has set up, and once approved a recruiter turns it into a vacancy in Recruit. Job multiposting publishes the ad on several job boards at once, candidates move through pipeline stages, and interviewers fill in interview scorecards. The Time to fill, Time to hire and candidate sources reports in HR analytics show how long each vacancy takes to close and which channels actually work.