The kind folks at Bersin Associates in Oakland, CA gave us permission to share some awesome data from their $999 Talent Acquisition Factbook 2011 authored by Karen O’Leonard.

A Recruiter Makes 21% Of Your First Year’s Salary (E.g. $21K Here In SF)

An employer’s cost per hire is  21% of an employee’s first year’s salary when they use a third-party recruiter or staffing agency.

Using San Francisco as an example (where the average tech professional makes $100K per year), recruiters are making an average of $21K per placement.

So, next time a recruiter calls you might consider getting him to buy you more than just lunch (pizza and beer every day for one year would still leave the recruiter with most of the commission!).

Other Items that piqued our interest included:

• The average cost per hire for Technology employers to hire you is $4,339 (this is lower than the $21K mentioned above because a recruiter is not used for many hires…non-recruiters costs of a hire include job posting and referral fees).

• Employers find you most commonly through job boards (19%) (see chart above), employee referrals  (16%) and because you visited their Careers section of their Web site. Internal candidates make up 19% of their hires as well.

• An average of 89 people apply to every job opening (for professional-level positions) and 144 people apply to entry-level jobs.

• Smaller employers have an 88% higher cost of hire than large employers (likely due to scale).

Thanks again, Bersin!

by in Hiring