Is there any citation for this stat? I'm having a very hard time wrapping my head around this stat because it doesn't seem even remotely reasonable on the surface.
It's going to be the cost of filling one headcount, not the cost of hiring a specific person. In other words it will cover:
• Recruiter/sourcer fees. These are typically a fraction of the salary, so that right there is a large chunk of it.
• The cost of all the interviews needed to locate enough candidates that one accepts. If you interview 60 people in order to make one hire, and conservatively assume an interview takes one hour for doing it and one hour for prep+writeup+hiring manager/committee analysis, then that's 120 hours of skilled labor.
• Hiring bonuses.
• Relocation fees.
• Travel costs for all the people you interviewed on-site.
• On-boarding cost (HR, legal, IT setup, possibly desk provisioning and equipment purchase).
• For some types of employees, time spent in negotiation, meets and greets etc.
I can see an inefficient company with a bad manager that doesn't really know what they want spending a year's salary in a bad process where they're continuously changing requirements, meeting in committees, inventing new rounds of interviews, etc.
What throws me is the claim that this is possibly around the average.
There are efficient companies out that there that can pick through the resumes in a few hours, arrange a few interviews, and have somebody hired in a week or two.
So if there are efficient companies out there dragging down the average to a year, does that mean there outliers out there that are spending 2 years, 3 years , or more worth of salary to fill a position?
