Cost per Hire Calculator

Comparing your figure to a benchmark compares two recipes

There is a published standard for this, ANSI/SHRM-06001.2012, and most figures quoted in the wild do not follow it. Some include the salaries of your own recruiting team and some do not. Some count relocation and sign-on bonuses, which are money paid to the person rather than money spent finding them. Some divide by external hires only, and some count internal moves that consumed recruiter time and almost no outside spend.

Each of those choices moves the answer by a lot, and none of them is visible in the number that comes out. On the sample used to test this tool, one file of costs and one set of hires produces answers from 2,500 to 5,000 depending only on which choices you make. So when your figure comes in under a published benchmark, the first question is not what you are doing well. It is whether the two numbers were built the same way.

This tool takes no position on which recipe is right. It shows the one it used, line by line, lets you move any line, and moves the answer while you watch.

The default split, stated rather than implied

Money spent finding somebody counts. Money paid to them once found does not. Agency fees, job boards, background checks, assessments, candidate travel, visas and your applicant tracking system are in. Your recruiting team’s salaries and referral bonuses are in, because they are what finding people costs you. Relocation and sign-on bonuses are out, because they are compensation.

That is a defensible reading and it is not the only one. Both figures are shown so the gap between them is visible instead of buried.

A figure with no recruiting team in it is not cost per hire

It is external spend per hire, which is a useful number with a different name. If your recruiters’ salaries are not in the file, the tool says so, because that figure will sit well below any benchmark that includes them and the difference is not performance.

Averaging your teams is not the same as your overall figure

A team that made two executive hires at 30,000 each and a team that made fifty warehouse hires at 200 each average out to 15,100. Total spend over total hires is about 1,346. Both get quoted, usually without anybody noticing which one they have. An average of averages gives a team of two the same weight as a team of fifty, so both are printed here whenever team figures exist.

A small number of hires is not a rate

With three hires, one agency invoice moves the figure by thousands. That is arithmetic rather than a finding, and a number like that should be read as a description of those three hires and not as something to track quarter on quarter or hold anybody to.