My Receptionist Just Quit. What Are My Actual Options?

If your receptionist just resigned, you have four real options: rehire, bring in a temp, use a human answering service, or put an AI receptionist on the phone. Most businesses end up running two of those at once, because rehiring takes weeks and the phone rings tomorrow morning either way.

What follows is the cost shape of each one, how fast each can start, and what to do about your existing number in the meantime.

Key takeaways

• The urgent problem is not the hire. It is the next fortnight of unanswered calls.
• Rehiring realistically takes four to ten weeks from first ad to unsupervised phone answering.
• Super alone adds 12% to the advertised wage, and leave, public holidays and workers compensation sit on top of that.
• You can divert your existing number to anything, temporarily and reversibly. You never have to change the number itself.
• Most businesses in this position bridge the gap first and decide on the permanent answer second. That order is the right way round.

The first 48 hours

Two things happen at once, and only one of them is urgent.

The employment side is mostly admin. Your former receptionist stays employed and paid until their last day. If they walked out without giving the notice their award or agreement requires, most awards let you withhold up to a week's wages from their final pay, as long as they are over 18 and the deduction is not unreasonable. You cannot claw it back out of their leave. The Fair Work Ombudsman's resignation guidance sets out where those rules come from, and honestly, chasing a week's wages usually costs more in aggravation than it recovers.

Casual staff are different again. They do not have to give you any notice at all.

The urgent side is the phone. From the moment nobody is sitting at that desk, every call is either going to your mobile while you are with a customer, or going to voicemail. Neither is a plan. If you want a sense of what that actually costs you per week, the missed call calculator will do the arithmetic with your own numbers.

Option 1: rehire the role

The obvious move, and often the right one, but be realistic about the clock.

You are advertising into a competitive market. The ABS counted 329,500 job vacancies across Australia in May 2026, 293,800 of them in the private sector. Good administrative people have options.

The sequence is: write the ad, wait for applications, shortlist, interview, check references, make an offer, then wait out the successful candidate's own notice period. Then two to four weeks of training before they can handle your phone without you hovering. Four to ten weeks end to end is normal. Faster happens, but do not plan around it.

The number nobody quotes

The salary is the advertised figure. The cost is bigger.

Superannuation is 12% of ordinary time earnings, per the ATO. From 1 July 2026, Payday Super means that money leaves with every pay run rather than quarterly, so the total is the same but the cash flow is tighter. On top of that: four weeks of annual leave, personal leave, public holidays, workers compensation, payroll tax once you pass your state's threshold, and whatever recruitment costs you. business.gov.au's hiring guide walks through the obligations you take on the day you make the offer.

Add it up and the real cost sits well above the advertised wage before you have counted a single training hour. The salary is the number you put in the ad. It is not the number that leaves your account.

None of that means do not hire. It means know what you are comparing against when someone quotes you a monthly figure for answering calls.

Option 2: a temp or a casual

Fast, flexible, expensive per hour, and they will not know your business.

A temp can be at the desk within days. That is the whole point of them. What you get is someone who can take a message and be polite, not someone who knows that the Tuesday delivery goes to the back entrance or that the customer ringing about the Ashgrove job is the one who has already complained twice.

Best used as genuine short-term cover where physical presence matters: you have a waiting room, walk-ins, deliveries, or a front door that needs a person behind it. If the role was mostly phone and email, a temp is an expensive way to solve a problem you can solve better.

Option 3: a human answering service

An offsite team answers in your business name, takes messages and passes them on. Setup is usually a few business days: account, greeting, a short script, a list of who gets what.

They are good at sounding human, because they are. They are less good at anything specific to you. Most work on a per-call or per-minute basis, which means a quiet month is cheap and a busy month is not, and you have limited control over who picks up on any given day.

Option 4: an AI receptionist

Answers every call on the first or second ring, at any hour, with the same information every time. Takes the caller's details, answers the questions you have told it how to answer, books the appointment if you let it, and sends anything it cannot handle straight to you with a summary.

Setup is configuration rather than recruitment, so it can be live quickly. It is at its best on the repetitive volume: opening hours, do you service my suburb, can I book Thursday, has my part arrived. That is most calls for most service businesses.

It is not the answer for everything. An angry customer, a complicated variation on an existing job, or anything needing negotiation should go to a person. The workable setup is AI answering everything and escalating the awkward ones, not AI trying to be you. We have written up how the booking side works if that is the part you are unsure about, and the AI receptionist page covers the rest.

Can you keep your existing number?

Yes, and this is the bit people get needlessly worried about.

You are not porting your number or getting a new one. You are diverting it. Call forwarding sends calls from your existing number to wherever you want them to land, and you can point it somewhere else, or turn it off entirely, whenever you like. Your signage, your vehicle, your Google Business Profile and your ten years of printed quotes all stay correct.

That reversibility is what makes bridging low risk. Divert to something this week, rehire properly over the next two months, and if you decide you want the calls back on a desk, you switch the diversion off.

Side by side

We have deliberately left dollar figures out of that table. Real quotes swing hard on call volume, hours of coverage and how much the thing needs to know, and a made-up average would be worse than useless when you are trying to make a decision this week.

Bridging the gap while you rehire

The mistake is treating this as one decision. It is two.

Decision one is what answers the phone from Monday, and it needs to be made this week. Decision two is what the role looks like permanently, and that deserves more than a panicked fortnight of thinking.

Bridge first. Divert the number to an answering service or an AI receptionist, get the calls captured and the details recorded, and buy yourself the room to hire properly instead of hiring whoever is available. Plenty of businesses that do this never go back to a full-time front desk, because they discover the phone was only ever half the job and the other half can be redistributed. Plenty of others hire someone better than they would have in week one, precisely because they were not desperate.

Either outcome beats losing eight weeks of enquiries while you interview.

Where to start

If the phone is the immediate problem, sort the diversion first and the org chart second. If you want to talk through which of the four fits your call volume, get in touch and we will tell you straight, including when the answer is just hire someone.