Short answer: advertising a job yourself looks free, but it rarely is. UK employers take almost five weeks on average to get from application to signed offer (StandOut CV). Even HR professionals spend about 18 hours of admin on every vacancy (Totaljobs via People Management). For a small business, those hours usually come out of the owner’s or a manager’s week.
1. Your time
A Totaljobs survey of 748 HR leaders found that recruiters spend 17.7 hours of admin on each vacancy. That’s more than two working days before anyone has sat in an interview. The biggest chunks were reviewing applications (3.6 hours), scheduling interviews (2.5 hours) and writing up notes afterwards (3 hours).
Those are people who recruit for a living. In a small business it’s usually the owner or a busy manager doing it between everything else, so it often takes longer.
2. The empty desk
While a role is empty, the work either doesn’t get done or lands on the rest of the team. StandOut CV’s survey of 497 hiring managers puts the average UK time to hire at 4.9 weeks, and other analysis puts the UK median at 40 days (NatWest Mentor). That’s from application to offer, before any notice period.
As a rough illustration, a role paying £28,000 a year represents about £540 of work a week. Five weeks of searching plus a one-month notice period means over two months of that work covered by someone else, or not at all.
3. Candidates you lose along the way
The CIPD’s 2024 resourcing report found that 64% of organisations trying to recruit had difficulty attracting candidates. And 27% had problems with counteroffers or candidates dropping out after accepting a job. A slow process makes both worse, because good candidates are often talking to more than one employer.
4. The cost of getting it wrong
The Recruitment & Employment Confederation worked out the cost of a bad hire for a middle manager on £42,000. Once wasted salary, retraining, lost team productivity and a knock-on resignation were added up, the total came to £132,015 (REC, Perfect Match report). Most hires won’t cost anything like that. But the biggest costs weren’t the salary at all. They were lost productivity across the team (£29,160) and another good employee leaving (£54,000).
What a good recruiter takes off your plate
- Writing and placing the advert
- Sifting every application and phoning the promising ones
- Interviewing and checking candidates before you meet them
- Arranging interviews around your diary
- Handling offers, counteroffers and the wait through notice periods
At Pineapple Careers, Ashley does all of this personally and puts three to five screened candidates in front of you. You only pay when someone starts, and every placement comes with a 12-week rebate.