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Cost Per Hire Calculator

Know what recruiting really costs — ads, agency fees, internal time, and onboarding per position filled.

Your numbers

Start from an example

$
$
$
hr

Total recruiter time across all hires in the period.

$
hr

Total time hiring managers and panels spent interviewing.

$
$
Number of hires

Result

Cost per hire
$14,300
Total recruiting cost
$14,300
Internal time
$3,300
External spend
$8,000

Cost build-up by category

Each lane adds to total recruiting cost.

Advertising
$2,000
Total recruiting cost: 2,000
Agency
$5,000
Total recruiting cost: 7,000
Referral
$1,000
Total recruiting cost: 8,000
Internal time
$3,300
Total recruiting cost: 11,300
Onboarding
$3,000
Total recruiting cost: 14,300

General business information, not legal, tax or financial advice. The result comes only from your inputs and the published method. How we check our numbers.

How to use it

  1. Enter every cost tied to a hiring round: job board and advertising spend, agency fees, referral bonuses, internal recruiter hours and their hourly rate, interviewer hours and their hourly rate, onboarding costs, and the number of hires the spend produced. The internal-time inputs are where most founders undercount, because recruiter and interviewer hours are real labour cost even when no invoice is attached to them.
  2. Read total recruiting cost, cost per hire (total divided by the number of hires), and the breakdown across advertising, agency, referral, internal time, and onboarding. The breakdown is what makes the number actionable: a high cost per hire driven by agency fees has a very different fix than one driven by dozens of interviewer hours per candidate.
  3. Use cost per hire to judge whether your process is efficient or just expensive. If internal time dominates, the lever is a tighter funnel and fewer interview rounds, not a bigger advertising budget. If agency fees dominate, the question is whether the roles justify that premium or whether direct sourcing would pay back over the next few hires.
  4. Translate the figure into a budget decision by multiplying it across your planned headcount for the year. A cost per hire that looks tolerable for one role can become a five-figure line item across a hiring wave, which is the point at which investing in a repeatable internal process or an applicant tracking system starts to pay for itself.
  5. Re-run after each hiring round and track cost per hire as a trend by role type, since senior and specialist roles legitimately cost more than junior ones. Pair this with the employee cost tool to see the fully loaded cost of the person once hired, so the recruiting spend is judged against the value the role actually delivers.
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Use it from code

The same calculation as a JavaScript module you can import. It runs where you import it, with no request, key or rate limit.

import { compute } from "https://aibizhub.io/engines/cost-per-hire-calculator.js";

Input and output contract, TypeScript types and the guide for agents.