Hidden cost of recruitment

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 | Updated: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:59 GMT

The average hidden cost associated with recruiting a new employee is over £5,000, according to recruitment consultancy Angela Mortimer.

The findings come from the organisation’s own Cost of Recruitment Calculator which was developed to allow employers to monitor the cost-per hire of new staff, with the aim of helping them meet their recruitment needs on time and within budget. The software takes both the hard (e.g. advertising rates and recruitment consultancy fees) and soft (e.g. management time spent sifting through CV’s or cost of existing staff shouldering extra responsibilities while awaiting arrival of new staff member) costs into consideration and quantifies the total cost of recruitment by inputting the relevant factors.  

Ashley Williams, director of partnership products at Angela Mortimer says: “The recruitment process can be a costly one for a business involving both tangible and intangible costs affecting the company’s overheads and productivity. It is surprising to find how frequently the difficult to measure intangible costs exceed hard cost expenditure.