The resignation lands on a Friday. By the following week there is an acting head, a search that has "started" in the sense that a job description has been forwarded to three agencies, and a line in the management pack noting that the seat will be filled "in the quarter". Four months later the acting head is still acting, two of the three agencies have gone quiet, and the one candidate everyone liked took a counter-offer. Nobody has put a number on what those four months cost, because the only number anyone can see is the salary that was not paid.
The salary-saved fallacy
Take a head of credit risk at an NBFC. Our 2026 benchmark puts the director and head band at 60 to 110 lakh fixed. Call it 85 lakh at the midpoint. Every month the seat is empty, roughly 7 lakh of fixed pay is not spent, and that is the figure that reaches the CFO. It is real, and it is the smallest number in the calculation.
The fallacy is treating the seat as a cost line rather than as a decision point. A head of credit risk exists so that policy changes, exposure limits, new product approvals and portfolio interventions happen on time and with someone accountable for them. When the seat is empty, those decisions do not stop being needed. They either wait, get made by someone whose job is not to make them, or get made badly. The salary saved is a rounding error against any one of those outcomes going wrong.
Where the cost actually sits
Decisions that wait. A lender launching a new secured product needs a credit policy signed off. A growing book needs its concentration limits revisited. A rise in early delinquency in one segment needs a view on whether to tighten. Each of these has a named owner, and when the name is missing the item sits on the risk committee agenda for a second and third meeting. The cost is the product that launched a quarter late, or the segment that was tightened a quarter too late. Neither shows up as a hiring cost, and both are hiring costs.
Regulatory standing. For compliance, financial crime and information security leadership, the seat is often a designated role in the eyes of the regulator or the board's audit committee. Regulated entities are expected to have accountable, suitably senior people in these functions. An open named seat is a conversation with the regulator and the auditors, not only with the CFO. Our compliance benchmark notes that roles carrying a formal regulatory designation price above equivalent unnamed seats for exactly this reason: the person is carrying accountability that the institution cannot leave unassigned for long.
Work that flows upward. When a head of technology risk leaves, the technology risk work does not go to the manager below. It goes to the CRO, the CIO or the CFO, who now spend time on IT audit findings and third-party risk reviews instead of on their own job. This is the most expensive labour in the building doing work that a 65 to 115 lakh seat should be doing, and doing it with less context.
Interim cover. Acting heads are usually the strongest manager in the function, which means the function's second-best seat is also now half empty. If the cover comes from a consultancy, the day rate for a credible senior risk professional in India is high enough that three months of cover can approach the annual fixed pay of the permanent hire, without the accountability.
The team below. Senior risk and compliance teams are small and mobile. A long vacancy above them is read as a signal about the institution's priorities, and the best of them start taking calls. A four-month vacancy at the top of a function is frequently followed by two resignations underneath it, which is how one search becomes three.
Why these searches run long
The senior risk and compliance market in India is deep in the middle and thin at the top. The pool for a head of credit risk who has run policy for a secured retail book at scale, in the city you need, at the level you can pay, is a few dozen people rather than a few hundred. Most of them are employed, most of them are not looking, and the ones who are looking are visible to every agency at once.
Three things then stretch the timeline. The first is a brief that describes the seat as the last person held it, not as the business needs it next. The second is pricing the seat against an internal band that has not moved with the market, so the first two candidates decline before an offer is made. The third is decision latency: a risk committee that meets monthly, a CEO interview that takes three weeks to schedule, an offer that needs board ratification. Each of these adds two to four weeks, and the candidate you want is being courted by someone faster in each of them.
There is one more factor specific to risk roles. Candidates in this function weigh whether the seat carries genuine standing, meaning a real veto against growth, more than they weigh the headline number. Our credit risk benchmark records this directly: fintech lenders pay a leadership premium over banks, and candidates still turn down the higher number when they doubt the seat's authority. A search that cannot answer "who does this role report to, and what happens when it says no" will lose its best candidate at the second conversation.
How to close the seat in four to six weeks
Four to six weeks from brief to accepted offer is achievable for senior risk and compliance seats. It is the window we work to, and it depends on decisions the institution makes in the first week far more than on anything the search firm does after it.
Write the brief for the next three years, not the last three. The book will be different, the regulatory agenda will be different, and the leadership team may be different. State the seat's authority explicitly: reporting line, committee membership, veto standing, and what the board expects from the function. Our hiring brief template asks the eight questions a senior search is won or lost on and takes an hour to complete.
Price it before you start, not after the first decline. Use the published bands as a floor and decide before the search opens what you will pay for the profile you actually want. For a CISO, the band runs from 55 to 150 lakh, and the spread reflects real differences in scope. Decide which end of that range the seat sits at, and why, before a candidate asks.
Pre-book the decision calendar. Before the first candidate is met, hold the panel slots, the CEO slot and the committee or board slot that an offer will need. A candidate who meets the panel on Monday, the CEO on Thursday and has a written offer the following Tuesday is a candidate who joins. The same candidate met over six weeks is a candidate who has had time to be counter-offered.
Run a calibrated shortlist, not a long list. A shortlist of three to four people who have all been screened for the domain, the scale and the regulatory context is faster to decide on than a list of fifteen where the panel has to do the screening. Our shortlists on senior mandates typically reach the client within two weeks, and every candidate on them has been priced and has confirmed their interest in the specific seat before the client sees them.
Plan for the counter-offer on day one. Senior risk professionals are counter-offered almost without exception. Ask the candidate, at the first conversation, what their current employer will say when they resign, and build the offer and the notice-period plan around the answer. The counter-offer playbook covers the mechanics.
What to do about cover in the meantime
Name the acting head formally, in writing, with the authority the role carries, and tell the regulator and the auditors that you have done so. An informal acting arrangement satisfies nobody and leaves the person doing the work without the standing to do it. Then set a date, six weeks out, by which the permanent hire will be under offer, and treat that date as a management commitment rather than an aspiration. The seats that stay open for a year are the ones where nobody was ever accountable for closing them.
If the seat has been open for more than a quarter and the search has stalled, the useful question is not "why is the market so thin". It is which of the three delays, brief, price or decision speed, is the one your institution controls and has not yet fixed. In our experience it is nearly always all three, and the first one to fix is the brief.