What one hired developer actually costs. You probably haven't counted

About eighty percent of clients answer 'no' or quote only the job-board posting fee when I ask what it actually costs to close one IT vacancy. The math is much larger — and changes hiring strategy.

There's a question I ask almost every new client: "Have you counted what it actually costs you to close one IT vacancy?" About eighty percent say "no" or quote only the job-board posting fee. Those aren't the same thing.

The visible part

People remember the recruiter salary and the agency commission. They forget the rest. Let's count a real middle backend hire in a 50-person product team.

• Internal recruiter: €4K/month distributed across 4 active roles → €1K per role per active month.
• Postings, sourcing tools: €600/month total → €150/role.
• Reference checks, background screening: €100 per finalist.
• Agency, if used: 20% of annual gross. For a €60K hire — €12K paid at start.

Already 5-10× what most people answer with.

The invisible part — team time

The piece nobody puts on a spreadsheet. For one middle backend hire:

• CTO/team lead time on briefing, interviews, finals: 12-15 hours over the search.
• Senior engineers running technical screens and take-home reviews: 8-12 hours.
• Peer interviews: 4-6 person-hours.
• HR coordination: 6-8 hours.

At fully-loaded engineering cost of ~€60/hour and ~€90/hour for CTO time, that's another €2.5-4K per hire — invisible on any invoice.

The most expensive line — drag on the team

While the seat is open, the existing team produces 15-25% less. In a 6-person engineering team running at €35K/month fully-loaded cost, that's €5-9K/month of foregone output. Multiplied by the months the search takes.

For an average 3-month senior search: €15-27K of pure output lost. Bigger than the agency fee usually.

What the math means in practice

I'm not saying "always use an agency." I'm saying: the decision-relevant number isn't "agency commission vs. recruiter salary." It's "(agency commission + extra time on agency oversight) vs. (drag from a longer internal search)."

If your internal close time is 4-5 months on senior roles, the "we'll save the commission" math goes negative. Quickly.

How to actually count

• Take the target salary (gross with payroll taxes).
• Multiply by 1.3 for fully-loaded cost.
• Multiply by 2.5 — the empirical drag multiplier for senior/middle in a product team. (1.5 for a generic junior, 4 for a team-lead-class role.)
• That's your monthly cost of the seat being open.

Then compare with whatever the agency commission divided by expected time saved looks like. The math gets honest fast.