Quick gut check for the owners reading this: how many hats are you wearing today?
Sales. Operations. Finance. Customer service when someone's out sick. And somewhere in there, hiring.
In September I ran a month-long series on LinkedIn for owners about what it actually costs to handle hiring yourself. A few weeks ago I wrote here about the real cost of a vacant role. This post is the other half of that math: what it costs you, personally, to run the search.
The pattern I see constantly
The job gets posted between meetings. Resumes pile up. You finally sit down to sort through them at 9 p.m. because it's the only quiet hour you have. Good candidates go quiet because you didn't get back to them fast enough. You eventually hire whoever is available and responsive, not necessarily who's best, because you're out of runway and out of time.
That's not a hiring problem. It's a bandwidth problem wearing a hiring costume.
Cost 1: Your time
Here's what a single hire takes, in owner hours:
|
Step |
Hours |
|
Writing the job description |
2 to 3 |
|
Posting and managing job boards |
2 to 4 |
|
Sorting resumes |
3 to 6 |
|
Phone screens |
5 to 10 |
|
Coordinating interviews with your team |
3 to 5 |
|
References, offer, paperwork |
3 to 5 |
|
Total |
18 to 33 |
That's 20 to 30 or more hours per hire, and that's if nothing goes wrong, nobody ghosts and you don't have to restart.
The only question that matters: what's your hour worth doing the thing you're actually good at, running and growing the business, compared to doing something a specialist could do in a fraction of the time?
Cost 2: The vacant seat
I covered this in detail in "The Real Cost of a Vacant Role." The part that matters here: the cost compounds. Week eight of an open role costs more than week one, because the strain on your team has been building the whole time. The "savings" from not paying a recruiting fee can disappear entirely if a search you're running solo drags on for months instead of weeks.
Cost 3: The rushed hire
When you're buried and a decent-enough candidate is finally in front of you, the temptation to make the offer and move on is enormous. But rushed decisions and bad hires go together.
A mis-hire costs onboarding time, team disruption, possibly a difficult exit conversation, and starting the search over from zero, now further behind than when you started. In a 2017 CareerBuilder survey, 74% of employers said they'd hired the wrong person, at an average cost of $14,900 per bad hire. That's before counting the time.
The irony is that owners try to save time by rushing, and end up losing more time than a well-run search would have taken.
What a specialist actually changes
A dedicated recruiter typically fills a role faster for one simple reason: they're not starting from zero. They often have a warm network, a pipeline of people who weren't actively looking, and screening already built, because sourcing and vetting candidates is the whole job, not something squeezed between everything else.
The part owners underestimate most, though, is the advice. A recruiter who's active in your market can tell you what comparable roles are paying right now, whether your requirements are realistic, whether your timeline is aggressive, and where your job description might be scaring off the people you want. That's closer to a strategic partner than a seat-filler.
And there's the old line about working on your business, not in it. Recruiting is one of the clearest examples. It's time-intensive, it takes a specific skill set, and for most small businesses it doesn't happen often enough to build real expertise. You end up relearning the process every time. Every hour spent screening resumes is an hour not spent on the parts of the business that need you in the room.
Running the math
Add it up: 20 to 30 or more hours of owner time per hire, a vacancy that gets more expensive every week, the real risk of a rushed hire, and the strain on your team while the seat sits open. Then compare that to a recruiting fee.
For most owners, once they actually run the numbers, outsourcing isn't the expensive option. Doing it all yourself, slowly, while everything else slips, is the expensive option. It's just a cost that never shows up as a single line item, so it's easy to underestimate. If you want to compare models, start with my post on why fractional recruiting beats the traditional agency model.
Two sides of the same broken process
At the end of that September series I wrote a crossover post, because the candidate series I was running at the same time kept landing on the same problem. Candidates are frustrated by opacity: silence, mystery, not knowing why nothing is moving. Owners are frustrated by inefficiency: time drained, searches that drag, hires that don't land.
They're the same problem viewed from opposite sides: a hiring process nobody designed on purpose, that both sides are just surviving. Fixing it from both directions at once is the work I do every day.
If you got even one hour back a week, what would you do with it? If you'd like to find out, reach out here.
Sources
· CareerBuilder survey by Harris Poll (2017; 2,257 employers): https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nearly-three-in-four-employers-affected-by-a-bad-hire-according-to-a-recent-careerbuilder-survey-300567056.html
Check out our other related blogs:
The Real Cost of a Vacant Role
Why Fractional Recruiting Beats the Traditional Agency Model
What Separates a Great Recruiter From an Order Taker