Time Tracker for Recruitment Agencies: How Much It Really Costs to Fill a Vacancy
Head of Marketing
How much does it cost your agency to fill one role? Not the fee you charge, but the cost — recruiter hours multiplied by what those hours are worth.
If the answer is “roughly, somewhere around that,” you are running the business blind. And almost certainly some of your roles are loss-making — you simply don’t see it.
Cost per Hire rests on one number that most agencies never count: how many hours actually went into it.
A time tracker for a recruiting agency gives you that number — and along with it, answers to questions you never even asked.
Which service actually makes money
Link hours to roles — and you’ll see a picture that often turns the strategy upside down. Here is how it looks in an example:
| Role | Fee | Hours | Cost | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Head of Sales | 90,000 | 94 | 75,000 | +17% |
| 10 operators (volume hiring) | 120,000 | 60 | 48,000 | +60% |
| Mid-level developer | 75,000 | 80 | 64,000 | +15% |
| Executive search | 200,000 | 210 | 168,000 | +16% |
Look closely: the “prestigious” executive search for 200 thousand is the least profitable one. And the “unglamorous” volume hiring that agencies are often embarrassed to take on is the most profitable.
Plenty of agencies position themselves as an executive boutique and can’t work out why they earn so little. The answer is in this table — it’s just that nobody had built it before.
[insert screenshot here: time report by projects/roles. Alt: “Recruiter time tracking by role in Yaware”]
Where a recruiter wastes time without noticing it
The second discovery is where the time goes inside the process. Sourcing channels deliver very different returns:
| Channel | % of time | % of hires |
|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn Recruiter | 35% | 45% |
| Internal database | 10% | 25% |
| Job boards | 30% | 20% |
| Cold sourcing | 20% | 8% |
The internal database is gold left in the ground: a quarter of the result for a tenth of the time. Job boards and cold sourcing eat half the day for 28% of hires.
Simply reordering the sequence — your own database first, then LinkedIn, everything else on a leftover basis — usually cuts an agency’s time to fill by several days. Not by working more, but by working smarter.
The fee conversation you will no longer lose
“Why 25% of the salary? You just posted the job on a website.” Sound familiar?
The trouble with this conversation is that the client doesn’t see the work. They see the result — the candidate — and have no idea what stands behind it.
Show them. A report from a comparable closed role: 47 hours, 180 profiles reviewed, 34 first contacts, 12 interviews, 4 finalists. Once the client sees this, “why is it so expensive” turns into “ah, so that’s how much work it takes.” You’re not making excuses — you’re showing the work.
[insert screenshot here: report by role. Alt: “Client report with an hours breakdown by role in Yaware”]
You can work out your real Cost per Hire during the trial period — 14 days free →
“Sourcing is chaos, you can’t track it”
The most common objection from recruiters — and it is in fact an argument for a tracker.
Precisely because sourcing is chaotic — 50 tabs, jumping between LinkedIn, email, the CRM and calls — logging it by hand is impossible. Automatically, though, it’s easy: the system recognizes work resources on its own and separates them from personal browsing.
The chaos doesn’t go away, it simply becomes visible. And manageable.
Another advantage of automation: the recruiter doesn’t have to write anything down. The only action is switching the active role when the focus changes — one click. Everything else runs in the background.
What a recruiting agency specifically needs from the system
- time linked to roles and clients — the basis for Cost per Hire
- categorization of sourcing channels for efficiency analytics
- client reports with a stage-by-stage breakdown
- recruiter workload analytics for an even distribution of roles
- tracking of offline meetings — interviews, client meetings
A detailed breakdown of the selection criteria is in the guide How to choose a time tracker.
FAQ
How does the system tell work on different roles apart?
Through a link to a role or a client: the recruiter switches the active role with one click, or the system takes the context from the profile open in the CRM or ATS. With five to ten roles running in parallel, the time is allocated correctly — which you can’t do by hand at recruiting pace.
Won’t it slow down work that’s already under pressure?
Quite the opposite. The tracker runs in the background and the recruiter logs nothing manually. What they get instead is analytics showing where time is wasted — and how to fill roles faster.
What do you show a client who says it’s too expensive?
A report from a comparable role: hours by stage and the funnel in numbers — profiles reviewed, contacts, interviews, finalists. Specifics instead of an abstract percentage shift the tone from haggling to understanding.
Can you compare recruiters’ performance against each other?
Yes, but it’s more accurate to compare not “who sits at the desk longest” but the ratio of time spent to roles filled, along with the structure of the process. The most valuable use isn’t a ranking — it’s spotting the working patterns of your most successful recruiters so you can teach them to the rest of the team.
Summary
A time tracker for a recruiting agency answers the central question for a business that sells results: how much that result costs. It shows the real profitability of each type of role, reveals inefficient sourcing channels and gives you arguments for the fee conversation.
Work out your Cost per Hire. 14 days of full functionality, free.
