Cost per Hire
Recruiting costs typed a line at a time, split into external and internal, divided by the hires they produced — with the vacancy and retention beside it.
Cost per hire with the external and internal halves separated, the largest single line, the ratio as a share of pay, what the vacancies themselves cost, and the change against your own previous period.
Example: 27 900 of invoices and 15 000 of internal time over four hires is 10 725 each — 35 % of it internal, and agency fees alone are 56 % of the total.
One ratio,
two very different halves.
Why the internal half decides whether the figure means anything, and why no benchmark is stored here.
What goes in
Cost per hire is total recruiting cost divided by the hires it produced, and the argument is always about the word total. External costs are the ones that arrive as invoices — agencies, job boards, fairs, background checks, relocation, referral bonuses. Internal costs are the ones that do not — recruiter time, hiring-manager interview hours, the applicant tracking system, onboarding. A company that counts only the invoices will always look cheaper than one that counts its own people, and it is usually the same company a year apart, which is why this page keeps the two apart instead of adding them silently.
What it costs to leave the seat empty
The figure most hiring conversations actually need is not on the invoice at all. A vacancy has a running cost — lost output, overtime for the people covering, a delayed project — and it is charged for every day the process takes. With a daily figure and a time to fill, the page adds it to the recruiting spend, and that fully loaded number is what argues against a slow process: cutting agency fees while the role stays open a month longer usually loses money. Cost per retained hire does the same job at the other end, because cheap hiring that does not stick is the most expensive kind.
Limits
A ratio, not a verdict. Cost per hire says nothing about who you hired, and it falls whenever you hire more people for the same spend — including when you lower the bar. No industry benchmark is stored here, deliberately: the published averages mix industries, seniorities, countries and, above all, different definitions of what counts as a cost, so the only comparison this page offers is against your own previous period. Read it beside time to fill, quality of hire and retention. Nothing leaves the browser; the same four anonymous usage counts as the rest of the site apply.
SOURCES
- Total recruiting cost ÷ hires, with external and internal costs kept apart so two figures are comparable; no industry benchmark is stored, because published averages are not computed the same way
Last reviewed 22 September 2026. How results are checked: How we verify.