What is that empty automation seat actually costing you?
Most teams track the cost of a wrong hire. Almost nobody tracks the cost of the seat that stays open — and on a live automation project, that is usually the bigger number. See the exposure in your own figures.
Your open role
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Indicative only. This models the direct, defensible costs — diverted engineering time and lost output, loaded for project phase. It deliberately excludes liquidated damages, demobilisation cascades and the bid you could not make, because those are project-specific and we will not guess at them.
Find your next hire →How this is calculated
Weeks open, CTC, project phase and who is covering set the figure; the role pre-fills the CTC and sets the typical time-to-fill. The figure is built from three parts, and each one is something you can check.
- Diverted senior time. When a seat is empty, someone more expensive usually covers it. We cost their diverted hours against a senior engineering rate derived from the CTC you entered, scaled by how much of their week is going to the gap.
- Output not produced. The seat was budgeted because the work has value. We treat the unproduced output as the loaded cost of the role — the standard, conservative way to value an unfilled position.
- Phase loading. A week lost during commissioning is not a week lost during design. Later phases carry a multiplier because the site date does not move.
What it excludes on purpose: LD/penalty exposure, demobilisation and remobilisation costs, and the revenue effect of work you could not bid. Those dominate the real number on large projects, but they are specific to your contract and we will not invent them.
Want this as a one-page breakdown you can forward?
We will send the figure with the assumptions written out — the kind of thing that survives being shown to a finance lead.
Who is writing?
Hiring: tell us the role in three fields. Looking for a role: join the Talent Universe with your CV.
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Why automation seats stay open longer
Engineering roles take materially longer to fill than general roles, and control-systems roles sit at the harder end of that range — the platform has to match, the project phase has to match, and the engineer has to have actually done it on a live plant. Add a technical offer-acceptance rate of roughly 73% against about 84% for business roles, and roughly one in four technical offers is turned down — so a failed search costs you the cycle twice.
| Time to fill, engineering vs general roles | ~62 days vs ~44 days | SHRM / Genius, 2025 |
| Cost of an open position | ~USD 4,000–9,000 per month in lost productivity | SHRM, 2025 |
| Technical vs business offer acceptance | ~73% vs ~84% | Pin, 2026 |
| Leading engineering rejection reasons | "not enough experience" 16.3%, "missing skills" 15.4% | Pin, 2026 (500K+ applications) |
| Salary bands used for defaults | TVP 2026 India automation salary guide | Published bands |
If the number above looks wrong for your project, it usually means the search itself is built wrong rather than the market being empty. Send us the role and we will tell you how to build it. See how we screen, or Find your next hire →
The talent isn't keeping pace with the build-out.
India is deploying Industry 4.0, grid modernisation, and process automation faster than the engineering workforce can specialise to run it. The gap is not a shortage of engineers — it's a shortage of engineers who can be trusted on a live commissioning floor.
of Indian employers can't fill skilled roles — well above the global average, with Energy among the hardest-hit sectors.
ManpowerGroup Talent Shortage Survey, 2025A wrong technical hire costs 30%+ of first-year salary at minimum — and 50–200% once lost productivity, slipped timelines, and re-hiring are counted.
U.S. Dept. of Labor; SHRMMost recruiters can't tell a qualified control-systems engineer from a risky one — because they've never read a P&ID, tuned a loop, or sat through a SAT.
The gap we exist to closeWe close that gap. We map talent to your actual project requirements, not a job description — so every hire is a decision you can stand behind.