Interview cost calculator
What your interview load costs per hire and per year — plus the term every other calculator leaves out.
Interviewing cost is hires per year × candidates interviewed per hire × rounds × hours per round × interviewers present, multiplied by a fully-loaded hourly cost. This tool does that arithmetic with your numbers, adds the hours spent by candidates you did not hire, and prefills no benchmark and no assumed saving — you supply those too.
Your interview load
Roles you actually fill, not headcount plan.
How wide the funnel really is at interview stage.
Averaged across those who drop out early and those who go all the way.
Include preparation and write-up if your interviewers do them.
People from your side in the room.
Fully loaded, in your own currency. Your figure — this tool has no benchmark.
What interviewing costs you
- Interviewer hours a year
- 720
- Annual interviewing cost
- $43,200
- Interviewing cost per hire
- $2,160
- Candidate hours spent by people you did not hire
- 300
That last figure costs you nothing, which is exactly why it is never in these calculations. It is the largest number on this page for most teams.
What a narrower funnel would be worth
Your estimate, not ours. We have no data on what CalHire saves a team, so this tool will not invent a figure and multiply it by your salary costs.
- Interviewer hours freed
- 240
- Worth, at your own hourly figure
- $14,400
How to read the result
The number that usually surprises people is not the annual cost, it is the cost per hire. Interviewing is normally budgeted as time rather than money, so it does not appear next to the agency fee or the job board spend it is often larger than.
The second number worth sitting with is the candidate hours. A team hiring twenty people a year, interviewing six candidates each for three hours, consumes around three hundred hours of other people’s lives to no outcome. That cost is real, it is paid by people with no say in the process, and because it is free to the employer it is the cost least likely to be managed.
What moves both figures is the same thing: interviewing fewer people who were never going to be hired. That is a screening problem, not an interviewing one — the interview is a very expensive way to discover someone cannot do the job. Establishing ability before the interview is the argument behind verified skills assessment, and whether it works for you is a question your own numbers answer better than ours.
Questions about interview cost
How do you calculate the cost of interviewing?
Why are there no benchmark figures prefilled?
Why does the tool not tell me what CalHire would save?
What is the “candidate hours” figure?
Is this the same as cost per hire?
Do my numbers get sent anywhere?
The terms behind this calculator
What interviewing is supposed to measure, and how well it does.
Quality of hire
A measure of how well hired candidates perform and stay, used to judge whether a hiring process is selecting the right people.
Full definitionStructured interview
An interview in which every candidate is asked the same predetermined questions and their answers are scored against a rubric defined in advance.
Full definitionWork-sample test
A selection method in which a candidate completes a bounded, realistic task drawn from the job, and the output is scored against predefined criteria.
Full definitionPredictive validity
The extent to which performance on a selection method actually predicts performance on the job, expressed as a correlation.
Full definitionRead further
Where interview time goes, and what actually predicts performance.
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ReadStructured interviews: the highest-return change most teams never make
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