Project-Based Hiring for Marketing Teams: Budget the Work, Not the Headcount

Last updated: November 5, 2026

Budget a marketing project by listing the deliverables, estimating hours for each seat, multiplying by an hourly bill rate, and adding a review buffer. At a 24% burden, $100 an hour of contractor pay loads to $124 and bills at about $150 to $160. KORE1 contract assignments run a median 116 days (n=1,887, all roles, as of October 2026).

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

Finance said no to two headcount. Then yes to the launch.

Same meeting. Same budget year. And honestly, both answers make sense. A salary is a promise that runs for years. A launch ends on a date. So the money for the work exists and the money for the people doesn’t, which leaves somebody to turn one into the other before Friday.

That somebody is you. You’ve got a spreadsheet open and no idea what goes in the first cell. Sound familiar?

I’ve been recruiting for more than 25 years, most of it in executive search, and these days I handle marketing, creative, and media searches inside KORE1’s digital and creative staffing team. KORE1 sells project staffing and contract staffing, both billed by the hour, so I’m not a neutral party. Weigh it accordingly. This works whoever you call.

More of my clients are asking for exactly this lately. The money is approved for the project, and nobody wants to carry a full-time salary once the last deliverable ships, which is a sensible way to spend a tight year as long as the budget is built on the work and not on the org chart.

How Do I Turn a Project Into Hours and Roles?

Start with what ships, not with who you’d like to have. Project-based hiring means bringing in people for a defined piece of work and paying for the hours it takes, with nothing on the payroll after the last deliverable lands and no awkward conversation about it in January. Under time and materials, the invoice follows the hours worked. You set the scope, you direct the work, and the work decides how long anyone stays.

That’s the whole idea. The rest is arithmetic. Pencil first.

• Write down every deliverable. Not “the campaign.” The landing page, the 30 social assets, the email kit, the three 15-second spots.
• Put hours next to each one, as a range, and ask the person who’ll do the work. A designer can tell you in thirty seconds what an email kit takes, while a VP will tell you “a couple of days.”
• Group hours by seat.
• Multiply each seat by the hourly bill rate. More on that below.
• Add a review buffer, because feedback is where hours leak. I’d start at 15%. Rule of thumb, not benchmark.

Notice what’s missing. No line for “one designer.” There’s a line for 320 hours of design work, and whether that turns out to be one person full-time for eight weeks or two people half-time is a staffing question you can answer later, once the hours are down on paper. Hours first, titles later. Plenty of project budgets go wrong at the very first row, because somebody typed a title and a salary where the work should have been, and by the time the invoices arrive nobody can find the row that went sideways.

Don’t know the hours yet? Say so. Put in a wide range and narrow it after you’ve talked to someone who has staffed this kind of project. I may not get the hours right on the first call either, and I’d rather hand you an honest range than a confident guess that falls apart in week three.

Which Seats Belong on the Project, and for How Long?

Not every seat starts on day one. Or lasts.

Take a ten-week campaign build. The art director comes in first, part-time, to set direction in the opening weeks and check the work after that. The graphic designer carries the middle in Figma and Adobe Illustrator. The copywriter runs alongside, and the motion designer shows up late for the three weeks the spots need in After Effects. Four seats, four shapes. Not one of them is a full-time hire for the whole stretch. I walked through the same wave idea in staffing a campaign launch with contract creatives.

Other projects bend the shape. A rebrand rollout front-loads the people who sort and rebuild, and a marketing automation migration clusters its seats around a cutover date. Ask for hours a week, not just weeks. A seat at 20 hours a week for ten weeks costs half of a full-time one and answers a different need.

How long is “a project,” anyway? Here’s what KORE1’s own records say. Across 1,887 contract assignments that have ended, covering hires from 2019 through 2026 with data through October 16, the median ran 116 days, and a quarter of them wrapped in 44 days or fewer while another quarter ran longer than 227. A ten-week campaign, which is 70 days, sits comfortably in the middle half. Those figures cover every role KORE1 staffs. Treat that as a read on contract work overall and not as a creative benchmark, because I’d be making something up if I called it one, and you’d be the one repeating it to your CFO.

What Is Inside a Bill Rate?

This is the line finance circles first. Why does an hour of a contractor’s time cost more than the contractor is paid?

Take the round number my colleague Devin Hornick, a Partner at KORE1, likes to use, because the arithmetic is easy to follow. A contractor is paid $100 an hour. The employer’s burden on that pay, at 24%, adds $24, so the loaded cost is $124. That covers the employer’s share of payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, insurance, and paid sick leave. Then the staffing firm has its own cost of running the business, which is how the bill lands at about $150 to $160. Pay, loaded, billed. Three numbers.

The tax piece is public. For 2026 the employer pays 6.2% Social Security on wages up to $184,500 and 1.45% Medicare on every dollar, according to IRS Publication 15. Unemployment taxes, workers’ compensation, and sick pay come on top. The 24% is the burden KORE1 uses in its published examples, and yours will drift with your state and the job’s insurance class. Nobody invoices you for burden as its own line, since it sits inside the rate the way rent sits inside a restaurant’s menu price.

Why does this matter for a project budget? Because the number you multiply hours by has to be the bill rate. Not the pay rate. Not the salary divided by 2,080 hours that you pulled off a job board. A budget built on the pay rate comes in short by a third or more before anyone opens a file, and a designer paid about $30 an hour at the federal median bills in the mid-$40s, per the modeled numbers in what contract creative talent costs in 2026.

Why Does a Quoted Markup Look Lower Than It Is?

Burden gets left out.

When a firm quotes you a markup, ask what it’s a markup on. A percentage figured on pay alone can sound modest in the proposal, and then the payroll costs turn up later as a bigger number on the invoice that nobody in the room remembers agreeing to. Devin’s advice here is simple. Work with a firm that’s willing to show you how it makes its money and hides nothing.

So make it a rule. Ask each firm to price the same seat in three lines, what the person earns, what the burden adds, and what lands on your invoice, then set the quotes side by side and compare only the bottom line, which is the one number that can’t hide anything. A firm that can hand you one percentage hasn’t given you a quote yet. It’s a teaser. Our guide to comparing staffing agency quotes covers the line-by-line habit, and how a KORE1 bill rate breaks down shows ours.

How Do I Present a Time-and-Materials Budget Finance Will Approve?

Give finance four things. A number, a range around it, a date it ends, and a rule for what happens if it moves.

Hourly billing is the part people worry about, and it’s the part that makes this easier. Devin said it plainly. “Hourly, which we prefer. It’s really more of a staffing model to do the hourly billing and you manage the person.” You direct the work. We employ the contractor on W2 and pay them every Friday, you see the hours each week, and the invoice matches them. The mechanics are in how contract staffing works.

Here’s what it looks like for that ten-week campaign. Everything in the table is an example, and the bill rates are the modeled ones from our creative rates page, so swap in a real quote the moment you have one, because KORE1 has no observed creative bill rates. I used the lower rate for the art director on purpose. The federal median for that job code covers art directors at every level, and a hands-on seat sits closer to the 25th percentile.

Read it from the bottom. About $50,000 to $54,000 for 920 hours, ten weeks, four people, and a date it stops. That’s the ask. Then show finance the row that moves it most, which is design hours, and say what you’ll do if that row runs hot. Extend the seat, shrink it, or end it. Hours get reported every Friday. Week three, not week nine.

If finance wants the same work set against two full-time hires, don’t compare an hourly rate to a salary. Compare the loaded cost of each over the same stretch, which the piece on contract worker vs employee cost lays out line by line.

Do I Need to Change the Job Description for Project Work?

Probably. And by more than you’d expect. My line on this hasn’t changed, which is that the job description is the blueprint, not the finished house, and on a project that blueprint has to carry things a permanent posting never mentions.

Deliverables first. Then hours a week and an end date. The tools, by name, whether that’s Figma, After Effects, or HubSpot. Who approves the work, and how quickly they answer. Skip “five to seven years of experience” unless you can say why those years matter, and ask for samples that look like what you’re buying instead, since a portfolio shows you the hour-by-hour reality better than any bullet list will. A contractor who has built twelve email kits has already shown you more than a paragraph of adjectives would.

And there’s the question under all of it. Do I need to change the description, or change what I’m looking for? On project work it’s often the second. If you’re asking for a senior art director’s judgment at a designer’s hours, the budget will tell you before the candidates do, and I’d rather you heard that from me early than from a stack of declined interviews.

What Marketing Leaders Ask Me Before They Take This to Finance

Is a contractor actually cheaper than an employee?

Per hour, a contractor costs more than an employee, but per project the contractor is often cheaper, because you pay only for the hours the work needs and nothing once it ends.

A salary is cheaper per hour and stays on the books through the slow months. A contract bill is pricier per hour and stops when the work does. Which one wins depends on whether the work repeats, and a one-time launch rarely does. The long version, line by line, is in the cost-benefit breakdown of contract workers and employees.

Who manages the contractors once they start?

You do, or whoever on your team owns the deliverables, because hourly contract staffing means the firm handles payroll and you direct the work.

That’s the trade. Say it out loud. Nobody at a staffing firm is going to art direct your campaign. If nobody on your side can, that’s a different problem, and the fix is usually to fill the art director seat first.

What if the project runs long?

Then you choose, with the hours in front of you. Extend the seat, trim it, or end it.

Because billing is hourly, a long project means more hours on the invoice and not a renegotiation. The weekly report tells you early. You’ll see it coming. And if a contractor turns out to be someone you’d keep, a KORE1 contractor who reaches 1,040 hours can convert to your payroll with no conversion fee, and that’s 26 weeks at full time. KORE1’s records hold 552 contract-to-hire placements, and I wrote up the first 90 days of one in contract-to-hire for creative roles.

Realistically, how fast can the team be in their seats?

3 days after the offer is the median start for KORE1 contractors, based on 1,997 offer-to-start records that span every role we staff.

That clock starts at the offer. The search comes first. I’d start talking to a recruiter about a month before the work needs to begin. For a seat like the motion designer in the example, who arrives in week eight, you can wait.

How much buffer is enough?

Start at 15% of the hours and treat it as a separate line, so finance can see it and you can spend it on purpose.

It’s a rule of thumb from watching feedback loops stretch projects, not a benchmark. Plan two rounds of revisions per deliverable and save the buffer for the third. If every deliverable is heading for a third round, the brief is the problem. No buffer fixes a brief.

What’s the Project, and What’s It Worth?

Bring me the messy version. The project, the deliverables as you understand them today, the seats you suspect you need, the start date, and how long you’ve got. I’ll tell you what I’d put in each row and where I think the estimate is soft.

Let’s talk about your project budget. If you’d like a modeled number for one seat before you call, contract creative rates is the place to start. So, what did finance say yes to?

Prefer to read me first? I’m on LinkedIn.