MEASURE CATEGORY: SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION

The Outsourced Costs

of Recruiting
Source:
APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking® Performance
Assessment for Talent Acquisition

Whether you are looking to ramp up hiring volume fast, explore new talent
pipelines, or reduce the administrative burden on your in-house recruiters,
outsourcing can make your recruiting process cheaper, faster, and more effective.

PERCENTAGE OF RECRUITING COSTS DEVOTED TO OUTSOURCING

20.00%

11.10%

6.70%

25TH PERCENTILE MEDIAN 75TH PERCENTILE

N=1129

Metric Calculation:

Outsourced cost to perform the process group

"recruit, source, and select employees"
DIVIDED BY x 100.0
Total cost to perform the process group
"recruit, source, and select employees"

INTERPRETING THE DATA:

Organizations at the 25th percentile spend 6.7 percent of the total cost of the recruiting
process on outsourcing. Organizations at the 75th percentile, by contrast, spend 20 percent
of the total cost of recruiting on outsourcing.
Note: Organizations at the 75th percentile aren’t necessarily doing anything wrong. There are many reasons why
some organizations might outsource more of the recruiting process than others such as when recruiting within a
completely new talent pool.

3 Leading Practices for Outsourced Recruiting

Develop a change Plan for future Work to improve all parts

management plan. needs early. of the recruiting process.

If you are planning to outsource
more of the recruiting process
than you have in the past, it’s
important to develop a change
management plan for any
retained internal recruiters and
hiring managers. An effective
change management plan
provides everyone with ample
time to transition and adjust.
An effective workforce planning
process helps you to imagine and
plan for potential futures. If you
know you’ll need to change
strategies and rely less on
outsourcers, for example, you’ll
want to give your organization
plenty of time to develop internal
recruiting expertise, relationships,
and talent pipelines.
Outsourcing cannot fix a broken
process. If there are parts of your
recruiting process that are still
carried out in-house, work to
continually improve and optimize
these parts of the process.

Outsourcing the recruiting process can benefit an organization in

numerous ways but doing so also carries risks and challenges.
Thinking through the pros and cons of outsourcing can help you
make a more informed decision about whether to outsource—and
to what extent. For more information on this topic, including the ©2022 APQC. All Rights Reserved.
pros and cons of recruitment process outsourcing, read the full
article The Outsourced Costs of Recruiting.