What is Cost per Hire?
Cost per hire is the total internal and external recruiting spend for a period divided by the number of hires made in it. External costs cover advertising, agency fees and tooling; internal costs cover recruiter and hiring-manager time, which is usually the larger and most often omitted share.
Last updated July 2026 · Reviewed by the TalentHive product team
Also known as: CPH
Omitting internal time understates the real number badly. A 45-minute phone screen costs roughly an hour of loaded recruiter time once scheduling and notes are included; across 40 screens per hire that dominates every other line item.
This is why per-interview pricing is a poor fit for high-volume hiring — cost rises with every candidate you screen, creating a direct financial incentive to interview fewer people. Flat-rate unlimited screening removes that incentive.
Related terms
Time to Hire
Time to hire measures the days between a candidate entering your pipeline and accepting an offer. It reflects the efficiency of your evaluation process. Time to fill, by contrast, counts from when the requisition opens, and so also includes sourcing time.
Quality of Hire
Quality of hire measures the value a new employee delivers, typically combining ramp-up speed, performance ratings, retention past a defined horizon and hiring-manager satisfaction. It is the outcome metric every other recruiting metric exists to serve.
Hiring Funnel
The hiring funnel describes the narrowing progression of candidates from awareness of a role through application, screening, interview, offer and acceptance. Measuring conversion between adjacent stages isolates exactly which step is losing candidates and why.
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