oes anyone have any knowledge of cost-per-hire for recruits into consultancy firms?I am keen to understand (as much as possible) an almost industry 'norm'. I am aware that most firms calculate CPH differently. i.e. some include capex and opex, some opex. Others only include agency spend divided by total number of hires.I am working on an internal project at the moment and want to include a bit of competitor analysis. My real question is, does anyone know the CPH of a consultancy firm (I don't need to know the name, just size of firm) and how it's calculated?I know it's a long shot, however, thought it'd be worth the ask!Any insight/help would be appreciated.

Hi TomAs you say some firms just divide agency (and usually any internal referral payments) fees by number of hires to come up with the figure. Others (most) will include fixed costs like recruitment team / HR salary or service charge of an RPO alongside advertising and recruitment events expenditure etc.Most firms don’t include cost of interviewer time as interviews are generally scheduled around projects to minimise impact on billable time or dare I say it the interviewer is ‘in two places at once’. Assessment days are usually done by consultants on the bench and partners / SE’s outside of any client time so don’t impact their utilisation levels. Firms generally don’t include things like first year attrition or loss of revenue due to inability to hire a particular position as they fall into the too difficult to calculate category but I know one of the big 4 estimated the loss of someone at partner had an overall cost of £500k.If you include all the elements in the first para CPH is generally between £5k - £10k – those at the higher end of this range will typically have a reliance of agencies and I have seen it come under the £5k mark if agency usage can be (virtually) eliminated. Hope this helps, happy to discuss if you have any more questions.

Cheers Horse, much appreciated