You decide you need a bookkeeper. You look up what one earns, you put that number in the budget, and you start looking. The number in the budget is wrong, and it is wrong in a predictable direction.
What actually lands on the invoice
- Salary — the number you budgeted
- Employer costs — payroll tax, benefits, equipment, software. Commonly a quarter again on top
- Recruiter fee — often a fifth of first-year salary, paid whether or not it works out
- Ramp — roughly ninety days before the role is running at full productivity
- Your time — writing the post, screening, interviewing, onboarding, managing
Only the first line is the one most owners plan for. The rest arrives anyway.
The coin flip nobody prices in
The uncomfortable part is that a hire can simply not work out. When it does not, you pay the ninety days, you pay the recruiter, and then you start again — at which point you pay both a second time.
Ninety days, a recruiter fee and a coin flip.
Run it against your own numbers
We built a calculator rather than publish a figure, because the honest answer depends entirely on your market and what you would actually pay. Put your numbers in and see the shape of it.
We do not compete on being cheaper. We compete on giving you the team you could not otherwise afford, starting inside a week instead of a quarter. But the arithmetic is worth doing before you write the job post.