Two months of notice

There is a line in most fourth-quarter plans that is a person who does not exist yet.

The role was approved in the spring. It has been open ever since: two rounds, a candidate who took something else, a rewritten description, a pause for the summer. Every plan written since April has quietly assumed that person would be sitting there in November.

Count the clock on it. The promotional season starts on the eleventh of November, twelve weeks from today. On the notice periods people actually serve in this region, somebody signed this week starts in October if the paperwork moves fast, and more likely in November. Then they need the tour: the products, the calendar, the approvals, who can say no. So the person hired in August to help with the season meets the season as the least useful version of themselves, and needs the attention of the people who are already the most stretched.

None of that is an argument against hiring. Hire. It is simply not a capacity plan for the fourth quarter, and it has been serving as one since April.

The capacity plan for the fourth quarter is the people already on the payroll, plus whatever piece of the work goes outside the building. That second part is going to happen either way. In every short-handed season I have watched, work leaves the building because there is nobody left inside to do it.

The only variable is when. Decided in August, it has a scope, an owner and somebody briefing it properly. Left until the third week of November, it is a phone call, and the scope is whatever the person on the other end says they can take.

A default is still a decision. It is just taken by whoever happens to be available.