What's your real cost per hire?

The 2026 SHRM benchmark for US cost per hire is approximately $4,700 across all industries. Tech and finance run higher ($5,000-$10,000+). The number includes recruiter time, ATS fees, job board spend, background checks, and a share of onboarding. Costs above $8,000 per hire usually signal recruiter-time waste from manual screening — the biggest line item most teams underestimate.

Cost per hire = (Internal recruiting costs + External recruiting costs) ÷ Number of hires. Internal includes recruiter salary, screening hours, and tools (ATS, LinkedIn Recruiter). External includes job board postings, background checks, and agency fees. Recruiter time is the largest hidden cost — at $75/hour loaded cost, screening 200 resumes per role for 12 roles per year adds $15,000+ before you count anything else.

Curriculo cuts cost per hire in three ways. First, AI screens resumes in seconds (saving ~80% of the 5-minute manual review per resume). Second, the free Starter plan removes the $0-$15,000 ATS line item. Third, signal-based scoring surfaces strong candidates earlier so time-to-hire drops by 35-50% on average. Combined, most startups see cost per hire drop from $5,000-$8,000 to under $2,000.

Studies put manual screening at 5-7 minutes per resume on average, but realistic numbers are higher because recruiters re-read borderline candidates. At 200 resumes per role and 5 minutes each, that's 16 hours of pure screening per role. With AI screening, the same workload takes 15-20 minutes because the AI surfaces the top 20-50 candidates first.

The calculator includes three main inputs: 1) Recruiter time on screening (calculated from resumes per role × minutes per resume × hourly cost), 2) ATS subscription cost (annual), 3) Implicit overhead from those two. It excludes background checks, signing bonuses, and onboarding costs (those vary heavily by role). The output is your annual external + screening cost — the part that's actually controllable with better tooling.