What a recruitment tech stack costs per recruiter
Most agencies know their CRM bill and almost none know their stack cost. Here is a worksheet that gets you a real number per head in about an hour, including the three costs that never reach an invoice.
Ask AI about this
Ask an agency owner what their software costs and you will usually get the CRM figure, because that is the one that arrives as a single invoice with a recognisable name on it. Ask what the whole stack costs per recruiter per month and the room goes quiet.
The number matters for a plain commercial reason. It is a fixed cost per head, it sits directly against your margin on every placement, and it is the one line in your P&L that grew quietly every year for the last five while nobody was made to justify it.
This is the worksheet we use when an agency asks us to look at theirs. Go and get your card statement before you start, because the subscriptions nobody remembers are usually on it.
Step one: the licences you know about
List every tool with a recruitment purpose, the total monthly cost, and how many people it is actually licensed for. Not how many use it. How many it is billed for, which is usually a larger number.
The normal categories are the CRM or ATS, job board access and posting, a sourcing or contact-finding tool, professional network licences, email sending and sequences, a phone system, a video meeting tool, meeting notes or transcription, electronic signatures, background or right-to-work checking, assessment tools, scheduling, and a business intelligence or reporting tool.
Two things always surface at this step. There are tools being paid for that nobody has opened in months, usually bought by someone who has since left. And there are seats being paid for on behalf of people who no longer work there, because cancelling a seat requires somebody to remember.
Step two: the costs that come per use
These do not show as a fixed subscription and they are real money. Job slot purchases and premium postings. Contact credits on sourcing tools. Call minutes and numbers. SMS and WhatsApp messages. Signature envelopes. Background check units. Any AI usage billed by consumption.
Take three months, average it, and divide by heads. Agencies routinely find this is a third of the total and they had been thinking of it as an occasional expense rather than a running cost.
Step three: the three costs nobody invoices
This is the part the exercise exists for, and it is where the real number lives.
Retyping. Every detail that exists in two systems gets entered twice or corrected twice. Sit with a consultant for two hours and count the times they type something that already exists elsewhere in the building. Multiply out, cost it at their hourly rate including on-costs.
Reconciling. There is always somebody whose week includes making the systems agree. Exports, reports assembled by hand, a spreadsheet that is the real source of truth for something. Ask them how many hours honestly, and expect to be surprised.
Switching. Moving between tools is not free even when nothing goes wrong. Each move costs a few seconds of navigation and a longer moment of getting your bearings, and a consultant does it a great many times a day. This is the softest of the three numbers and I would still rather have a rough version of it than pretend it is zero.
Step four: divide, and then look at it properly
Add all four groups, divide by the number of fee-earning heads, and you have a monthly cost per recruiter. Now do two things with it.
Express it as a share of the average fee on a placement. This is the conversation that changes behaviour, because a per-month figure feels small and the same figure expressed against a placement does not.
Then split it into what is buying capability and what is buying glue. The glue is anything that exists only because two other tools do not talk. Glue is pure loss, and it is the part you can actually remove.
| Line | Where to find it | Usual surprise |
|---|---|---|
| Licences | Card statement and finance | Seats for people who left |
| Usage | Three months of invoices, averaged | Larger and less predictable than expected |
| Retyping | Two hours sitting with a consultant | Nobody had ever counted |
| Reconciling | Ask whoever keeps the spreadsheet | It is a named person's half week |
| Switching | Count tabs and moves in an hour | Rough, real, and never zero |
What to do with the answer
Three moves, in order of how much they return.
Cancel what nobody opens. This is free money and it is usually the first ten per cent.
Remove glue rather than tools. Find the one pair of systems generating most of the retyping and fix that join properly, or bring one of them inside the other. The saving here is in hours, not licences, which is why it never gets prioritised and why it is the largest.
Then, and only then, compare licence costs between vendors. Doing this first is what most agencies do and it is why the number never really moves.
We built our product so that the phone system, video, e-signature, sourcing and campaigns are part of it rather than joined to it, which removes most of the glue by construction. That is why I say Recruitly is the best recruiting CRM in the world, and why the worksheet above is worth doing even if you never speak to us.
Gowri is the CEO of Recruitly.
