Staffing is a perennial issue for many heavy-duty businesses, and hiring and recruiting remains a top concern across the industry, according to a fall 2025 Trucks, Parts, Service survey of dealers, distributors and suppliers.
Open positions stay that way at a cost. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) says the average cost per hire for non-executive roles in 2025 was $5,745 and $35,879 for executive roles.
“This just accounts for the ‘hard costs’ of filling roles, like recruiting expenses, job ads, career fairs, travel, etc.,” says Anne Sparaco, senior specialist in media relations for SHRM. “When accounting for ‘soft’ costs, these expenses only rise, factoring in those invisible expenses like lost productivity due to the role being vacant, delayed projects, opportunity costs for recruiters and managers, and training time.”
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There’s not only recruiting costs, such as placing ads and the time spent interviewing candidates, but also in costs related to your other employees, who may be picking up the slack. These include missed deadlines, missed revenue, stress and more.
There are some cost savings, of course, to an open position. The company’s not paying benefits or payroll taxes on that person, for example, but it’s also not benefitting from the work that position does. A good rule of thumb, SHRM says, is to consider the cost to hire as three to four times the position’s daily salary per day the job is open.
Quantifying openings
Robyn Spitzke, president of Canada’s Fort Garry Industries, says it’s difficult to calculate the opportunity costs of a vacancy, but the company does track how much it pays to sponsor and post ads as well as how long it takes the fill a role.
“We get a lot of applicants,” Spitzke says. “It’s a time-consuming process to weed out the unqualified resumes. “Once we have chosen our candidates to review, it’s not uncommon to have people who don’t reply to requests to interview or are no-shows for an interview. That’s without taking into account whether they are truly qualified and fit for the role. Then you hope they show up on the first day. It can be a tiring process for a hiring manager.”
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To mitigate the effects of an open position on the employees still showing up, Spitzke says they cross-train as much as possible and have managers who can step in and help out.
“We have definitely increased our headcount to accommodate short staffing,” she says.
Rihm Kenworth in Minnesota says it consistently has technician openings as well as other positions based on replacement or growth.
“Right now, for example, we are expanding our parts sales team, so we have a couple open positions for that,” says Kristin Ridley, director of marketing communications for the Rihm Family Companies. “We average 84 days from the job being posted to time of hire. The biggest contributors to that length of time are recruiting diesel techs in remote locations where the talent pool is small.”
In some situations, the company might ask someone to fill in temporarily to help teams bear the burden of being a person down. For example, they might ask for a volunteer technician to temporarily fill in at an understaffed location.
Rihm also tracks how much it costs not to have someone in certain positions that equate to lost revenue for the company.
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“We might look at increasing a referral bonus or paying for sponsored ads to drive leads and applicants,” Ridley says. “In those cases, we track our cost per lead and cost per hire. The loss in service profit, on average, is roughly $16,000 per month, per tech.”
Right person, right time
The ultimate in mitigating the costs of hiring is to hire the right person in the first place. Spitzke says many of Fort Garry’s staffing issues aren’t so much about hiring someone as hiring the right someone who is engaged and present.
“This is why hiring right is so important,” she says.
Wes Sikes, president of AA Wheel & Truck Supply in Kansas City, says teams are definitely stressed when someone leaves, but for the most part, it’s short lived. He says AA’s vacancies are filled within a couple of weeks, usually by word of mouth. That helps ensure newcomers fit in well.
The AA Wheel hiring process is “super simple,” he says, usually a lunch with the applicant and members of the team “to get a variety of perspectives about the applicants’ fit to our culture and ability to be successful in the position.”
“A fit to our culture is the No. 1 objective,” Sikes says. “Then we look for experience and energy.”
Rihm hires based off its core values and is looking on how to use technology to improve its hiring process. Generally speaking, Ridley says applicants come through the website, social media or sites such as Indeed. Human resources and hiring managers work together to schedule interviews and the whole process is managed by an applicant tracking system.
“We’ve recently simplified our hiring process by moving our applicant tracking to the program we use for payroll, so the candidates now have a very streamlined experience from application to onboarding and beyond,” she says.
