A recruitment manager asking for a software budget can usually quote the subscription price. Ask what the team spent screening applicants for last month’s warehouse vacancies and the answer takes more work. A recruiter made the calls, a coordinator rearranged missed appointments and a shift manager read the notes between other duties. Their salaries are already in the budget. The part of their week spent on those vacancies is harder to see.
Count the work for one vacancy
Choose a role you hire for regularly and follow one group of applications from receipt to the decision about whom to interview. For each task, record who did it, how often and roughly how long it took. Include unsuccessful calls and the time spent writing up a conversation. If a candidate takes two days to reply, count the minutes someone spent chasing the answer. Keep the two days as a separate measure of how long the candidate waited.
Imagine a recruiter reviews 200 applications at three minutes each, completes 60 calls at ten minutes each including notes, and makes 30 unsuccessful attempts at two minutes each. That comes to 21 hours. If a manager then spends two hours reviewing the shortlist, the total is 23 staff hours. At illustrative hourly employment costs of €25 for the recruiter and €40 for the manager, screening that group costs €605, or about €3.03 per application. These figures are a worked example. A team can replace each one with its own volumes, timings and rates.
Price the work that would remain
Now take the same vacancy and describe how it would run with screening software. A candidate might answer the initial availability questions in a chat, leaving the recruiter to review the answers and call people whose availability needs discussing. Include that review time, the calls that still take place and the manager’s time with the shortlist. Allow for setup and training when estimating the cost of the first hiring round.
In the example above, suppose the recruiter’s time falls from 21 hours to 11 and the manager still spends two hours. The team has released ten recruiter hours, valued at €250. If the share of software and setup costs allocated to this group is €180, the revised estimate is €535 for the same stage of hiring. The €70 difference is an estimated change in the cost of doing the work. If the recruiter is salaried and works the same hours, payroll stays the same.
That distinction matters when the budget is discussed. A manager trying to reduce overtime needs to know whether any paid overtime will actually disappear. A team struggling to return calls may have a different use for those ten hours. During a trial, record what recruiters did with the time and whether candidates who needed a conversation got one sooner. That gives the budget owner something specific to weigh alongside the invoice.