Are Recruitment Agencies Worth It? The Math on One Open Seat

Last updated: October 8, 2026

A recruitment agency is worth it when the seat costs more sitting empty than the fee costs to fill. On an $85,000 marketing seat, a 20 percent fee works out to about seven weeks of that seat staying open.

By Samantha Litman, Executive Search, Marketing, Creative & Media, KORE1

“Honestly? You’re too expensive.”

I have heard that sentence, or a politer version of it, on client calls for 25 years. It’s a reasonable thing to say out loud, and I’d rather a client say it than think it. But it is almost always a comparison with one side missing.

My angle, said once and then I will stop: I get paid when you hire someone through me. So read the arithmetic below knowing that, and then go plug in your own numbers. I’d much rather you argue with my inputs than with my motives.

When somebody tells me the fee is too expensive, I ask what it is expensive compared to. The answer is usually zero. As though the choice were between paying a fee and paying nothing at all.

It isn’t. The other option is carrying an empty seat, and an empty seat has a price that never shows up on the line item anybody is actually looking at when they sit down to decide whether this is the week they finally call a recruiter or give it one more month. I run searches through KORE1’s digital and creative staffing desk, and this is the single most common place a hiring conversation goes sideways before it starts.

One Open Seat, Priced All the Way Down

Take one seat. A senior media planner at a media agency that just won a new account, which happens to be the call I get more than any other. The work is already sold. Deadline attached. Somebody has to build the plan out of Comscore and Nielsen data, get it into The Trade Desk and DV360, and then answer for it when the numbers come back, which is a lot of specific competence to go find in a hurry while the account team is already out there promising dates it doesn’t control.

Media planner roles on my recent searches have been paying $75,000 to $85,000. Call this one $85,000, since it is the senior version and the revenue is already booked.

Now. $85,000 is not what the seat costs you.

That is what goes on the offer letter. The seat costs more, and the federal government publishes exactly how much more. In the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026, wages and salaries accounted for 70.0 percent of total employer compensation costs for private industry workers, $32.82 out of $46.89 per hour worked. Benefits were the other 30 percent.

Run $85,000 back through that and the real cost of the seat is about $121,400 a year.

Seven weeks. That is the whole argument, and it is worth sitting with for a second, because seven weeks is not a long search. A search that has already been open a while and failed internally once routinely runs longer than that before anyone outside the building gets a call. Much longer, usually.

Two caveats, because I’d rather give them to you than have you find them. The weekly figure assumes the seat’s work has value roughly equal to its loaded cost, which is the assumption any agency makes when it staffs to a scope. And in a shop where the planner’s hours are billable against a signed scope, that figure is low rather than high, because what slips is billable revenue instead of internal productivity, and revenue that slips in October does not come back to you in November.

I am also not going to re-derive the fee-versus-internal-recruiter break-even here. That math is already written up in detail, both as the real cost math on hiring one recruiter and as a side-by-side on in-house recruiting versus a staffing agency on cost and speed. This piece is one seat, all the way down.

The Column Nobody Puts in the Spreadsheet

There is a second cost. Clients find this one genuinely annoying when I raise it, partly because it is their own time and partly because once you have seen the number you cannot go back to quietly pretending those hours were free.

Say the person running the search is on $150,000. Same BLS arithmetic: the loaded cost is around $214,300, which across 2,080 working hours is roughly $103 an hour. Every hour that person spends on the search is a $103 hour.

How many hours? I don’t know. That is not me being coy. It depends on your process, your approvals, how many people sit in your interview loop, and how fast your own calendar moves. So count your own:

• Reading resumes. All of them, including the forty that were never close.
• Phone screens, which is the part people underestimate by about half.
• Scheduling. Rescheduling. The thing where four people need to be in a room.
• The debrief after every loop, multiplied by everyone in it.
• Two finalists who go quiet in week six, and starting over.

Sixty hours at $103 is $6,180. A hundred hours is $10,300. Pick your own number. I am not claiming your search takes either of those, only that the hours are not free, that they come out of the person whose actual job is the account rather than the hiring, and that almost nobody on either side of the table ever bothers to count them.

Then the one I will not put a number on, because I cannot: the wrong hire. KORE1’s 12-month retention rate on placements is 92 percent, and I’d point at that number rather than invent a cost-of-a-bad-hire figure for you. You already know what a mis-hire costs you. You have probably had one.

“So What Is Your Rate?”

Fair question. Usually the first one on an intro call too, and I’d rather answer it straight than dance around it the way this industry has trained everybody to expect that we will.

Direct-hire placement fees are a percentage of first-year salary. Our own staffing agency pricing guide publishes the range we work in, 15 to 30 percent depending on the level and the difficulty of the role, with most direct-hire placements landing near 20 percent. That guide is written around IT roles, but the structure is identical on a creative or media search. Your actual number comes out of a conversation about the seat, not out of a blog post, including this one.

What the fee buys is less obvious than the percentage, so here is the honest version.

• Access. Most of the people I would want for your senior planner seat are employed, not looking, and will not answer a job posting. They answer me because we have known each other for years.
• The screen. AI will hand you a list of people who look qualified on paper in about four minutes, and not one of them has been asked a single question yet.
• Risk moves off your desk and onto mine. If the search fails, I ate the hours. Not you.
• Speed, which has a dollar value you just calculated. KORE1’s average time-to-hire across IT searches is 17 days, and creative searches are not that different when the hiring manager is responsive.
• And the part nobody puts in a proposal: I will tell you when your requirements are the problem. Which they sometimes are.

When I Am Not Worth It

Sometimes the answer is no. I’d rather say so on the first call than take a search I had no business taking, bill you for it, and then have you be entirely right about me afterward.

Companies with a real internal recruiting team, properly staffed, with a pipeline already built for the roles they repeat, rarely need me. They have the relationships. They have the employer brand. They fill their own seats faster than an outside firm could, and in my experience those are exactly the companies that never call me. Not false modesty. It’s just who I hear from and who I don’t.

Here is a test I actually use. Can you name five people you would call about this seat tomorrow, by name, and expect them to pick up? If yes, run it yourself. If you are opening LinkedIn to answer that question, we should talk.

Posting it and waiting is also a legitimate choice. It’s just not a free one. The BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for August 2026 counted 7.1 million open jobs against 5.2 million hires in the month. Those two numbers not matching is the entire business I am in.

The Part That Surprises People

A good agency relationship does not compete with your internal recruiting team. It is what lets you run a smaller one.

Think about how hiring actually arrives at an agency. It is lumpy. You win an account and need six people in eight weeks, then you need nobody at all for five months, and the recruiting seat you hired to handle the first situation spends the second one maintaining a pipeline for roles that are not coming. If you staff your internal team for the peak, you are paying for the trough. If you staff for the trough, the peak is the thing that breaks.

The companies that call me are overwhelmingly the second kind. They cut internal recruiting at some point, then picked up a new account and had to move fast on senior roles. That is the pattern, over and over, and it is not a failure of planning so much as an honest read on what a full-time recruiting seat costs when there is nothing to recruit for.

The cost of carrying that seat is also going up, which is the part most people have not priced in yet. The Federal Reserve’s August 2026 Beige Book, built from contacts reporting on or before August 24, found that “firms also broadly reported significant health care and insurance cost pressures,” and that labor availability across districts “was mixed.” Thirty percent of the cost of every seat you carry is benefits, and that thirty percent is the part getting more expensive.

So the real question is narrower than cheaper-versus-not. Which parts of your hiring are steady enough to own, and which parts are spiky enough to rent? Most agency owners I work with land on a mix: internal for the roles they fill every year, outside help for the senior seats and the surges. For the surge work specifically, contract staffing often fits better than a permanent hire, and tighter budgets have pushed more of my clients toward contract-to-full-time than they used to consider.

Before any of that, get the number right. If you are not sure what the seat should pay, the salary benchmark assistant is free, and I wrote up what ten marketing and creative seats actually pay from the searches I have run. A fee argument on top of a wrong salary is a waste of both our time.

Things Clients Ask Me About the Fee

What if we fill it ourselves while you’re searching?

Then you owe nothing. On a contingency search the fee is triggered by a hire I make, so if your own candidate crosses the line first, we shake hands and I move on. Say so when it happens, though. I will have people mid-conversation who deserve to hear that the role closed, and how a recruiter handles that moment is most of their reputation.

Does the fee come out of the candidate’s salary?

No, and I get asked this more than you would think. The fee is paid by the employer, separately, on top of the salary. Candidates pay nothing, ever. If anyone in this industry asks a candidate for money, that’s the end of the conversation.

Why is the fee the same when the search turns out to be easy?

Because you are paying for the outcome, not the hours, and the easy ones subsidize the brutal ones. Some searches take me three calls. Some take four months and two restarts and I still eat the time. Priced per hour, you would pay more on the hard searches, which are exactly the ones you needed help with. I understand why it grates when a search lands in a week. It still took 25 years of relationships to make that week possible.

We only have one seat open. Is that even worth your time?

One seat is how almost every relationship I have starts. Nobody calls me with twelve. And I will say something slightly against my own interest here: I learn more about how a company actually operates from running one search than from any briefing document anybody has ever sent me, because the document has been edited and the search has not. I am not screening you on volume. I am asking whether this particular seat matters.

What happens if the person leaves in four months?

That conversation happens before you sign anything, not after. Guarantee terms belong in your agreement rather than in an article, so I’m not going to quote you one here. The longer answer is that I’d rather never be in that conversation. It is why I spend what probably feels like too long asking a candidate what kind of leadership they want and what kind of environment they do well in, when you would quite reasonably rather I just sent the resume over. Months and years later it should still feel like the right call. For both of them.

Where That Leaves You

Go find the seat that has been open the longest. Multiply its salary by 1.43. Divide by 52. Then put that weekly number next to the number of weeks it has actually been sitting there, which tends to be the part people have to go look up, and are a little embarrassed by once they do.

Maybe the fee still looks expensive after that. It genuinely might. Some of the searches I have turned down are ones where I ran this arithmetic in my head during the first call and got no for an answer, so keep your money and fill that one yourself.

And if it stops looking expensive, I’d rather hear about the seat than about the rate. What is it, and how long has it been open? Let’s talk.