Recruitment Cost Benchmarks: How to Optimize Hiring in 2025

In today’s competitive job market, understanding recruitment cost benchmarks is essential for businesses of all sizes. At Recruitment Intelligence™, our AI recruiter, RiC, helps companies move beyond guesswork. By analyzing hire data, automating workflows, and highlighting inefficiencies, RiC enables companies to optimize their recruiting budget while improving the quality of hire.

​What Are Recruitment Cost Benchmarks?

​Recruitment cost benchmarks provide a good benchmark for comparing your recruiting process against industry averages. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the average cost-per-hire is $4,683 in the U.S., but this figure can vary widely depending on company size and industry.

This figure includes job ads, recruiter salaries, job board fees, relocation expenses, and even travel expenses during the recruiting process. Looking at these hire calculations helps organizations identify productivity losses, adjust recruiting budgets, and improve hiring performance.

Tracking these benchmarks allows HR leaders to:

• Optimize recruiting budgets
• Identify inefficiencies in the hiring process
• Compare performance against industry averages
• Improve long-term workforce planning with good benchmarks

Small Businesses: Keeping Costs Lean

For small businesses, hiring a new team member comes with unique challenges. Their cost-per-hire is often lower, but the consequences of a poor hiring decision can be much more significant: up to 30% of the employee’s first-year salary according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

​While the average hire figure may be lower than large corporations, the impact of a bad hire is significant, costing up to 30% of an employee’s first-year salary.

Key Strategies for Small Businesses:

• Use social media and employee referrals to lower recruitment costs
• Adopt AI tools for resume screening to save time
• Prioritize quality of hire through targeted outreach to passive candidates

​​RiC takes this benchmark data and translates it into practical insights, showing where businesses overspend and where they can save, often using effective hiring processes.

Mid-Sized Companies: Scaling Strategically

Medium-sized businesses face growing recruiting budgets while trying to avoid inefficiencies in their internal HR team. Their cost-per-hire is generally higher than that of small businesses due to greater competition for talent and expanding workforce needs.

Smart Approaches Include:

• Leveraging AI-driven candidate matching with real-time labor market data
• Using recruitment analytics to identify and engage passive candidates
• Automating recruitment workflows, which can reduce hiring time by up to 40% (LinkedIn Talent Solutions, 2024)

Enterprises: Volume Meets Efficiency

​Large organizations often face significant recruitment costs due to high-volume hiring. However, scalable AI-driven strategies can dramatically improve cost-efficiency while maintaining quality.

Advanced Solutions for Enterprises:

• Data-driven recruiting analytics to improve hiring ROI and calculate hire metrics
• Automated interview scheduling tools save HR teams an average of 13 hours per role (SHRM, 2024)
• Accessing the 85% of workers who aren’t actively job-seeking (LinkedIn Global Talent Trends, 2025) through passive candidate engagement

​The Recruitment Intelligence™ Advantage

At Recruitment Intelligence™, we help organizations of every size optimize their recruitment strategies. Instead of simply tracking metrics, RiC actively reduces costs by streamlining workflows, expanding candidate reach, and ensuring better-quality hires.

Ready to optimize your hiring process and reduce recruitment costs? Explore our full suite of solutions at Recruitment Intelligence.