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Signal key

key_role_vacancy

Category

People

Source

Person profiles, 60-day vacancy tracking.
A senior role stayed unfilled for 60 days.

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When it fires

Trigger condition

A C-level or VP-level person departed AND no replacement joined within 60 days. Emits on day 60.

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Magnitude

Moderate to high, prolonged vacancies affect decisions.
For the full bucket definitions used across percentage-based signals, see Magnitude buckets.

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Why it matters

A prolonged vacancy can stall or accelerate decisions depending on the gap. Sixty days without a replacement means functional decisions may be on hold, or an interim leader may be making expedient choices, either way, it’s a timing signal worth knowing.

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How to use Key Role Vacancy Signal?

The setup. You do business development for an interim-executive marketplace. Your product is a person: a seasoned operator who can hold a leadership seat for six months while the company searches properly. Your entire pipeline is other companies’ empty chairs. What you want. To find leadership seats the moment they go empty, because every week a key role sits vacant, the pain compounds and the willingness to consider an interim rises. The signal fires. key_role_vacancy fires for Danforth Logistics, a 700-person freight company. Their Head of Operations has left, and no successor has appeared. For a logistics company, an empty operations seat is not an org-chart gap, it is a daily operational risk with a name on it. Reading it. Companies tolerate vacancies in support functions for months. They cannot tolerate them in the functions that run the core business, and the timeline pressure works entirely in your favor: a retained search takes four to six months, and the CEO knows it. Your move.
  1. Move fast; this signal decays faster than almost any other. Week one is ideal, week four is late.
  2. Write to the CEO or COO with the trade-off framed plainly:
Filling a Head of Operations seat properly takes five months. I can have a freight-experienced interim holding it in two weeks, so the search can take the time it needs to be right.
  1. Attach one anonymized case study from the same industry. Specificity beats scale in a message like this.
  2. If they decline, stay close: vacancies that “the team is covering” have a way of becoming urgent around week eight.
Put it on autopilot. A weekly People Signals API pull on key_role_vacancy, filtered by function and company size, is effectively a live map of your addressable market, refreshed for the price of an API call. Why it lands. You are not creating a need. The empty chair does that every single morning.

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How to read it

Decisions on hold

An empty senior seat often pauses functional buying.

Interim choices

An acting leader may make fast, pragmatic decisions.

Backfill watch

The eventual hire reopens the buying window.

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Outreach playbook

Monitor. Decisions may be paused; re-engage when the role is filled.

C-Suite Departure

A C-level executive left the company.

VP Departure

A VP-level leader left the company.

Leadership Churn Spike

Multiple senior leaders departed in a short window.

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