Cost per hirecalculator.
Add up what you spent on recruiting in a period, inside the company and outside it, and divide by the people you hired. Free, no sign-up, and nothing you type is stored or sent to us.
Example figures: replace them with yours
Everything recruiting cost in the period: agency fees, adverts, software and your recruiters’ time.
Count accepted offers or starts, the same way every time.
Add detailCurrency, a period label, each cost line on its own, and a second period or role to compare.
Fill in the lines you know. Once any line has an amount, the lines replace the total spend above.
External costs
Money paid to people and companies outside your organisation for recruiting in this period.
Internal costs
What recruiting cost inside your organisation in the same period.
Recruiting team pay and benefits
The share of their pay and benefits for the time spent recruiting in this period.
Hiring manager and interviewer time
Hours spent interviewing and reviewing candidates × their hourly cost.
Your applicant tracking system and other tools, for this period.
Result
Cost per hire
$7,500
In this example, $45,000 spent on recruiting for 6 hires means each hire cost $7,500.
| Total recruiting spend | $45,000 |
| Hires | 6 |
Recruiting spend ÷ hires, for the same period. Split it into lines under “Add detail”.
In plain English
We spent $45,000 on recruiting for 6 hires: $7,500 per hire.
The link holds your figures, so anyone with it sees them.
The formula
What is cost per hire?
Cost per hire is the average amount an organisation spends on recruiting to make one hire: its external and internal recruiting costs for a period, added together and divided by the number of people hired in that period.
Formula
Cost per hire = (external costs + internal costs) ÷ number of hires
This is the formula in the American National Standard for cost per hire, ANSI/SHRM 06001.2012, developed by SHRM.
External costs are what you pay outside the organisation to recruit, for example:
- agency and search fees
- job adverts and job boards
- recruitment events and job fairs
- assessments and background checks bought in from suppliers
- travel for candidates and recruiters during the process
Internal costs are what recruiting costs inside it, for example:
- the pay and benefits of the recruiting team, for the time they spend recruiting
- the time hiring managers and interviewers spend on candidates
- recruiting systems such as an applicant tracking system
- referral bonuses paid to employees
Getting it right
A figure you can compare.
- Use one period for everything: the costs and the hires should cover the same months.
- Decide what counts as a hire, an accepted offer or a person who started, and keep to it, so one period compares with the next.
- Count only the recruiting share of shared costs. If a recruiter also runs onboarding, include the time they spend recruiting.
- Work out executive and high-volume hiring separately. Averaging them together hides what each one costs.
- Cost per hire says nothing about whether the hires were good. Read it next to quality of hire and time to hire.
Questions
About cost per hire.
What is a good cost per hire?
Does cost per hire include onboarding and training?
Should the recruiting team’s salaries be included?
How do I count hiring managers’ time?
Does this tool store what I type?
Related: offer letter template, interview invitation email template, interview cost calculator, time to hire calculator, cost of a bad hire calculator and how to reduce cost per hire.
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