What it is
Cost per hire is the fully-loaded cost of filling a single vacancy, everything spent to get one hire, not just the invoice for it. It includes external costs, agency fee, job board and advertising spend, sourcing tool licences, assessment or testing costs, and internal costs, the time an in-house recruiter or hiring manager spends sourcing, screening and interviewing, their share of ATS and CRM tooling, referral bonuses. The industry's standard formula, set out by SHRM and ANSI, sums total internal recruiting costs and total external recruiting costs and divides by the number of hires in the period, giving a comparable per-hire figure rather than a single lump total.
For an agency, the fee side of that sum is straightforward, it is the placement fee. For a client comparing routes to hire, cost per hire is what makes an agency fee, an in-house recruiter's fully-loaded time, an RPO provider's per-hire pricing and direct sourcing genuinely comparable, because it forces every route into the same unit: total cost to fill one role, however that cost was actually incurred.
Cost per hire isn't what the agency charges. It's what filling the role would have cost, whichever way you did it.
Why it matters
Cost per hire is the number a client reaches for the moment an agency fee looks expensive on its own. A fee that seems high in isolation can be the cheapest route to a hire once the client accounts for the recruiter hours, advertising spend and search time an internal effort would have burned instead, particularly on a hard-to-fill or confidential role. The reverse holds too: a fee that looks reasonable can be a poor deal if the client could have filled the role internally in a fraction of the time. Cost per hire is what turns "the fee felt high" into an actual comparison.
For an agency owner, the same metric cuts inward. It is one of the few numbers that shows whether the time a desk spends sourcing, qualifying and progressing a search for a given fee is actually worth running, or whether the desk is absorbing more cost in hours than the fee justifies. Typically the single largest line item on either side of that comparison is time, the hours a person, recruiter, sourcer or hiring manager, spends on a fill, which is exactly the part that is easiest to underestimate and hardest to see without tracking it deliberately.
How boilr handles it
boilr does not calculate cost per hire, that stays a benchmarking exercise the agency or the client owns, weighing a fee against whatever alternative it is compared to. What it changes is one side of that equation for the agency itself: the hours a consultant spends finding companies, sourcing candidates and drafting outreach. Your AI sales employee finds and enriches ICP-matched companies, detects buying signals and drafts finished outreach tasks, so the desk's own BD time and tooling cost stay flat even as the number of searches it runs grows.
That matters directly to how an agency argues its own cost per hire against an in-house team, an RPO or direct sourcing. Because the Company Brain keeps targeting and sourcing knowledge in one place rather than starting cold on every mandate, repeat searches into the same or similar accounts do not re-pay the full sourcing time cost from scratch, which is exactly the kind of hidden internal cost that makes a client's own cost per hire look worse than an agency's fee once someone actually adds it up.
