$495 cost-per-hire for candidates sourced from CollegeRecruiter.com

Over the past couple of days some interesting numbers have crossed my desk that I thought would be helpful to many of the readers of CollegeRecruiter.com Blog.

One of our clients is a Fortune 500 organization headquartered in the U.S. and almost all of its revenues are generated from business-to-business sales. It has a strong brand within its industry but the vast majority of people have either never heard of the organization or wouldn’t have a clue what the organization does even if the name rang a bell. In short, this is a client that has at best an average level of difficulty in hiring students and recent graduates. As a result, their cost-per-hire should be at best average when compared to other organizations of similar size.

They were kind enough to share some of their metrics with me. In 2013, they’re running about 140 internship and entry-level job postings per month with us. All of the jobs require three or fewer years of experience. Almost 1,000 candidates per month click through from the postings to the employer’s web site to apply so as of the end of June that’s about 6,000 apply clicks. During that time, they’ve interviewed 44 candidates, extended seven offers, and hired six people. Their cost per hire was $495.

Is $495 good, bad, or ugly? To answer that question, consider:

• According to ERE, the average cost per hire from job board ads is $1,671 and from employee referral programs is $2,306. Those are consistently the two largest sources of hires for most organizations. 
• According to Dice, the average cost per hire for all U.S. companies was $3,479 while the average cost per hire for U.S. companies having 10,000 or more employees like most of our clients have is $1,949.
• According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the average cost-per-college-hire for the mostly larger employers who belong to NACE is $5,054, while the median cost is $2,906. The wide difference indicates a great deal of variability in the data.

So no matter how you slice-and-dice the data, it is clear that the people we sent to the Fortune 500 client cost them very, very little to hire as compared to every other commonly used benchmark I could think of.