The short answer
Stabilise before you recruit. In the first thirty days, secure the handover, map what only that person knew, appoint an internal point of contact for each area, and tell customers and staff something true. Only then start the search — a rushed senior hire made under pressure is the expensive version of this problem.
Week one: stop the bleeding
Get a written handover covering live commitments, pending decisions, escalations in progress, and anything time-bound in the next ninety days. Sit in on it yourself. Identify the relationships — customers, suppliers, lenders — that ran through that person and make contact with each one personally within the week.
Week two: map the undocumented
Every departing senior person leaves behind knowledge that lived nowhere else: an approval that only they gave, a supplier who only answers them, a workaround nobody wrote down. Ask each department head what they used to escalate to that person and how it now gets decided. The list is always longer than expected, and it doubles as the job description for the replacement.
Weeks three and four: assign, then communicate
Name an internal owner for each area, even if temporarily and imperfectly. Ambiguity costs more than an imperfect assignment. Then tell your team something honest and specific about what happens next, on a stated timetable. In the absence of information, people invent worse stories than the truth.
Interim, fractional or permanent?
| Situation | Usually right |
|---|---|
| Business is stable, role is well defined | Recruit permanently, take the time to do it well |
| Something time-critical is mid-flight | Interim cover while you search |
| The role was never really designed | Fractional, to define it before you hire into it |
The third row deserves attention. Departures often reveal that the role had accumulated rather than been designed. Hiring a replacement for a badly shaped job reproduces the problem with a new name attached.
Before you post the job
Rewrite the role from what the business needs next year, not from what the last person happened to do. Then agree what the first ninety days should produce, and use that as the interview conversation. Candidates who engage with that seriously are the ones worth continuing with.
Three things to take away
- Stabilise for thirty days before recruiting — pressure hires are expensive.
- Map what only the departing person knew; that list becomes the job description.
- If the role was never designed, use fractional cover to design it before hiring.