Cost Per Hire Calculator

Enter your internal recruiting costs, your external recruiting costs and the number of hires made in the period, and get your cost per hire plus total recruiting spend. It is the standard efficiency metric for a hiring function, defined by SHRM and ISO 30414, and the number a finance team will ask for when you request budget.

Cost per hire = (internal costs + external costs) ÷ number of hires. Internal costs include recruiter and hiring manager time, referral bonuses, internal systems and onboarding admin. External costs include agency fees, job board and advertising spend, assessment and background-check tools, career fairs and relocation. Use the same period for costs and hires, usually a quarter or a year.

Internal costs ₹2,00,000, external costs ₹3,00,000, 10 hires in the quarter. Total spend ₹5,00,000, cost per hire ₹50,000. If agency fees make up ₹2,40,000 of the external spend, replacing agency sourcing for junior roles with a skills-test funnel is the single biggest lever on the number.

It varies enormously by role and country. SHRM's US benchmark has sat around $4,700 in recent years, with senior and specialist roles many times that. Agency-led hiring in India commonly costs 8% to 16% of annual CTC per hire. A useful internal benchmark is cost per hire as a percentage of first-year salary; anything above 20% for a non-executive role is worth examining.

Screen on skills before interviewing so hiring managers spend hours on fewer, better candidates. Replace agency sourcing for volume roles with a ready-made assessment funnel. Track source of hire so you stop paying for channels that do not convert. Measure quality of hire alongside cost, or you will optimise for cheap rather than good. springhire's free plan lets a small team test every applicant at no cost, which lowers external spend directly.