Picture a Tuesday at a 90-person company. The operations manager has three open roles, a stack of applications she hasn't opened, and an agency invoice on her desk for a hire who started two weeks ago. The owner asks the question every growing company eventually asks: "Should we just hire our own recruiter?"

It's a fair question, and there's no single right answer. There are three common ways to get hiring help, and each one charges you for something different. Some charge per hire. Some come with salary, benefits and the risk that the person leaves. This post lays out all three side by side, with real public numbers, so you can see what each one costs a company your size and when each one actually makes sense.

The three ways to get hiring help

1. Hire an in-house recruiter

You hire a recruiter as an employee. They learn your roles, your managers and your culture, and over time they build a pipeline of people who know your company.

What you pay for: salary, benefits, payroll taxes, tools, and your own time to hire and train them. The median annual wage for human resources specialists, the category the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses for recruiters, was $75,940 in May 2025 [1]. Benefits add more on top: for full-time private industry workers, benefits made up 31.5% of total employer compensation costs in June 2026 [2].

The catch: a recruiter is one person. If they leave, the seat is empty, open roles stall, and you start over: posting, interviewing, onboarding and waiting for the new person to get up to speed.

2. Use a staffing or recruiting agency on contingency

A contingency agency finds candidates and only gets paid if you hire one. SHRM reports that contingency recruiters usually earn a fee of about 20% to 25% of the role's first-year cash compensation, and retained executive searches run about 33% [3].

What you pay for: a result. No hire, no fee.

The catch: the fee repeats on every hire. For one hard role a year, that's reasonable. For a company hiring every month, it adds up fast. Agencies also work for many clients at once, so your role competes for their attention, and the candidates they find usually stay in their database, not yours.

3. A dedicated outsourced recruiter (RPO)

You may have heard the term RPO, short for recruitment process outsourcing. In plain words, it means an outside company runs some or all of your recruiting for you, as an extension of your team, usually for a fixed fee rather than a fee per hire. Big RPO firms often serve large corporations. A smaller version of the same idea is a dedicated recruiter: one person who works only for your company, full time, but is hired, trained and supported by a recruiting partner.

This is the model My Expert Recruiter (MER) uses. Each client gets one dedicated, full-time recruiter (about 40 hours a week) who works only for them, inside the client's own tools and process. The recruiter is trained through MER's Expert Recruiter Training Program and coached by MER, and the client pays a fixed monthly subscription, with no placement fee per hire.

What you pay for: capacity. A full-time recruiter's week, every week, for a predictable monthly cost.

The catch: it's built for companies that hire often. If you make two hires a year, you don't need a full-time recruiter of any kind.

Side by side

Example: a company that hires once a month

This is an illustrative example, not a real client. The hiring numbers are assumptions; the rates come from the public sources listed at the end.

Say your company has 120 employees and makes 12 hires a year, about one a month, at an average salary of $50,000.

Agency on contingency. At 20% to 25% of first-year pay [3], each hire costs $10,000 to $12,500. Over 12 hires, that's $120,000 to $150,000 every year, and the pipeline those fees built mostly stays with the agency.

In-house recruiter. At the median HR specialist wage of $75,940 [1], with benefits at 31.5% of total compensation [2], one recruiter costs about $111,000 a year before job boards, software and your time managing them. That can be a good deal if the person stays and performs. The risk is turnover. Gallup estimates that replacing an employee costs one-half to two times their annual salary [4]. For a recruiter at that median wage, that's about $38,000 to $152,000 in employee turnover cost, plus the months your open roles sit without anyone working them.

Dedicated recruiter. You pay one fixed monthly fee for a full-time recruiter, no matter how many people you hire. That's the big difference: the more you hire, the less each hire costs. To compare, take the yearly fee and divide it by the number of people you hire in a year. That's your cost per hire, and you can put it right next to the agency and in-house numbers above.

The pattern is simple: per-hire fees are cheap when you hire rarely and expensive when you hire often. Salaried recruiters are efficient when they stay and costly when they leave.

When each one makes sense

Every option on this list is the right answer for someone.

• Use an agency when you need one senior or very specialized hire, like a controller or a plant manager, and you'll only pay that fee once or twice a year. A good agency with a strong network in your niche is worth the fee for that kind of search.

• Hire in-house when you hire at real volume, have someone experienced to manage a recruiter, and can absorb the gap if they leave.

• Use a dedicated recruiter when you hire every month, recruiting is nobody's full-time job, and the owner, COO or HR manager has been doing it on the side. It's also a fit when your recruiter seat keeps turning over. That last one applies to staffing firms as much as to contractors, manufacturers and clinics: when recruiting is your product, an empty recruiter desk is lost revenue.

What this looked like for one staffing company

ATC Healthcare of NW Florida, a healthcare staffing company, came to MER at the beginning of 2026 after going through three in-house recruiters in eight months. For a business that depends on recruiting every day, the cycle of hiring and retraining recruiters was holding it back.

ATC added Tassia, a dedicated full-time Expert Recruiter. She completed training on ATC's software and process before her first day, so she was calling candidates and booking interviews from day one. Within her first week, candidates she found were hired and sent out on assignments.

The biggest change was consistency: the same recruiter, month after month. ATC is now adding a second Expert Recruiter as the business grows.

Want the full story? Read the ATC Healthcare case study.

If you want to see how agency recruiting works from the inside, and when it's the right call, My Expert Recruiter founder Mariane Amorim, a Registered Professional Recruiter (RPR), walks through it in her video "How Recruitment Agencies Work (And A Smarter Option)".

The bottom line

The cheapest option is the one that matches how often you hire. If it's a few times a year, pay per hire. If it's every month, you're probably paying more than you need to in fees, or in the hours you and your managers spend doing recruiting yourselves.

If you'd like to run your own numbers, book a conversation with the My Expert Recruiter team. No pitch deck, just your hiring math.

Sources

1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, "Human Resources Specialists" (median annual wage $75,940, May 2025; includes recruitment specialists). bls.gov

2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026" (released Sept. 9, 2026; benefits 31.5% of total compensation for full-time private industry workers). bls.gov

3. SHRM, "How to Work Effectively with an Executive Search Firm," Mark Feffer, July 18, 2016 (contingency fees about 20% to 25% of first-year cash compensation; retained search about 33%). shrm.org

4. Gallup, "This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion," March 13, 2019 (replacing an employee costs one-half to two times annual salary). gallup.com

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