When people discuss “the cost of hiring,” they usually point to visible items: an agency invoice, job board fees, or the salary of the in-house recruiter. 

In IT, that is only the surface. 

The real cost of bringing in a developer, architect, DevOps engineer, or entire tech team is spread across multiple layers: time, focus, productivity, onboarding, and, most importantly, the risk of a mis-hire. When you put all of those together, the true cost of IT recruitment is often far higher than it looks on paper. 

Why IT recruitment feels so expensive now?

Several reasons have made hiring IT talent more demanding over the last few years: 

• Skill depth and specialization – Roles are rarely “just a developer” anymore. Teams look for combinations of frameworks, cloud platforms, security practices, and domain knowledge. That reduces the pool of suitable candidates. 

• Longer hiring cycles – Multiple interview rounds, take-home tasks, live coding, stakeholder interviews, all of this extends the time a vacancy stays open and consumes internal time. 

• Candidate expectations – Experienced IT professionals usually have options. They expect clarity, quick feedback, flexibility (remote or hybrid), and a meaningful role. If the process is slow or unclear, they move on. 

• Global competition for the same people – Remote work has opened access to global talent, but it has also opened your local talent to global offers. The same candidate might consider roles from three or four countries simultaneously. 

All of this means you are not just “paying to fill a role.” You are investing a significant amount of organisational energy to attract, assess, integrate, and retain people who are genuinely hard to replace. 

The five layers of IT recruitment cost

To see the full picture, it helps to think in five layers rather than one. 

Direct hiring spend  

This is the part everyone knows: job ads and campaigns, LinkedIn and other sourcing tools, assessment platforms and coding tests, agency fees.  

These costs are visible, they sit in your HR or recruitment budget, they have invoices and they’re easy to track. Because they’re visible, they often get the most attention in discussions about “reducing recruitment costs.” 

Yet they are only one part of the story. 

Internal time  

Internal time is where the hidden cost of IT recruitment starts.  

Every IT hire usually involves:  

• Talent Acquisition or HR professionals 

• A hiring manager (CTO, Head of Engineering, IT manager)  

• Several technical interviewers from the team 

• Sometimes product, operations, or leadership for final interviews. 

The realistic sequence for one engineer would be the following:  

1. The recruiter discusses the role, aligns on the profile, prepares the description, selects applicants, runs first interviews, and decides which are eligible for a second interview.  
2. The hiring manager reviews CVs and gives feedback on which candidates to proceed with. 
3. Engineers run technical interviews, prepare tasks, and review solutions. 
4. Everyone involved gathers for a debrief and hiring decision. 

None of this is free. That time could have been spent on product roadmap, architecture decisions, refactoring, or supporting clients. Even if you never put a price tag on it, the opportunity cost is very real. 

Cost of vacancy  

While the role stays open, work does not stop. It is redistributed or delayed.  

• Roadmap items slip to the next quarter 

• Your current team takes on additional tasks and overtime. 

• Support teams carry more incidents than they comfortably can. 

• Users wait longer than they should for features or fixes. 

The impact of vacancy is not always visible in a monthly report, but you can often feel it in the team’s tension and in missed opportunities. Over time, that strain has a cost: slower delivery, increased churn risk, and sometimes burnout or resignations among your existing staff. 

Onboarding and integration  

When a new hire joins, the cost doesn’t stop, it simply changes shape.  

• HR, IT, and operations invest time in onboarding and administration.  

• New hires, no matter how seniors, need time to understand the codebase, systems, architecture, and standards. 

• Team members spend time pairing, reviewing, and explaining context. 

Even with a strong hire, you often have several months where the person is still ramping up. You’re paying their full salary, while they aren’t yet delivering at full capacity and other team members are temporarily less productive because they’re supporting them.  

A good onboarding process reduces this cost, but a weak one can increase it significantly.  

The cost of mis-hire  

Finally, there is the most uncomfortable layer: hiring the wrong person. A mis-hire in IT is not only the salary you paid someone who did not work out. It is: 

• The original recruitment cost (ads, tools, agency, interviews)  

• The time the team spent onboarding and mentoring  

• The work that had to be redone or rescued  

• The effect on team morale if the wrong person stays too long 

• The cost of starting the entire hiring process again.  

For a senior engineer or lead, the impact can reach far beyond their own role and affect entire projects or teams. This is why “cheapest” is rarely the best way to think about recruitment. Reducing the risk of mis-hire is one of the most effective cost controls you have. 

How to reduce recruitment cost without lowering hiring quality

The goal is not to make recruitment “cheap”. It is to make it efficient and low-risk. 

Here are a few practical levers. 

Be precise about the role  

The clearer the role, the smoother the process:  

• Align internally on responsibilities, expectations, and seniority  

• Distinguish what is truly essential from what is simply “nice to have”  

• Explain the context, team structure, tech stack, ways of working. 

Clear roles attract better-matched candidates, reduce wasted interviews, and lower the risk of mis-hire. 

Design a lean, respectful process  

A well-designed process:  

• Has a small number of stages, each with clear purpose  

• Gives candidates timely feedback  

• Allows internal stakeholders to decide quickly and confidently 

This protects both sides. Candidates don’t feel lost in a long pipeline, and your team doesn’t spend weeks repeating interviews and re-discussing the same profiles.  

Protect onboarding and team integration  

Onboarding is often seen as a “soft” topic, but it directly influences cost:  

• A supported new hire start performing faster 

• They’re less likely to leave in the first month 

• They start contributing value sooner, relieving pressure on the rest of the team. 

Structured first weeks, clear goals, a buddy system, regular check-ins can significantly lower the risk of early attrition and misaligned expectations. 

Treat recruitment as a long-term investment  

Instead of focusing only on “this hire” or “this agency fee”, it helps to think in terms of team stability, knowledge retention, time-to-productivity, flexibility to grow or adapt your team structure.  

This perspective opens the door to models that are not limited to single hires, such as dedicated teams, or remote teams that scale with your needs. 

How a partner can help you manage the real cost of IT recruitment  

At this point, it becomes clearer that controlling cost is less about negotiating a single price and more about choosing the right engagement model.  

This is where our services sit: we support clients through three core services – tech recruitment, tech hubs, and remote teams, under the  Build-Scale-Transfer model designed for long-term stability and flexibility.  

Tech recruitment – hiring directly into your organization  

Our experiences Talent Acquisition Specialist focus on sourcing high-quality tech talent and helping our clients build or expand their development teams.  

Key aspects of the Tech Recruitment service:  

• International reach, local relevance – We source from both local and global talent pools, depending on the profile and geography you need.  

• Direct employment by you – Candidates join your organization, not ours.  

• Fit by design, not by chance – Our experienced Talent Acquisition Specialists align closely with your technical requirements, culture, and ways of working, to focus on candidates who are likely to stay and grow.  

• Transparent pricing and risk-sharing – The cost structure is clear, with no surprise increases and risk-sharing if the new hire proves not to be a fit.  

This model is suited for organisations that want to strengthen their own internal team but recognise that finding the right people requires specialized recruitment capacity.  

Tech hubs – dedicated development teams in our locations, managed by you  

Some clients prefer to build dedicated development teams that sit in our tech hubs (Malaysia, Portugal, Macedonia), while remaining fully integrated into their own organisation. 

In this setup: 

• The team works exclusively for you and on your projects.  

• You manage the team directly, just as you would manage an internal team.  

• Together we build the team with the right people in skills and culture for your context.  

Our tech hubs usually operate in a hybrid model:  

• They work from our office part of the week.  

• This supports stronger teamwork, smoother communication, and easier knowledge sharing.  

• The hub environment is tailored to your needs and aligned with your culture and growth plans. 

Team continuity and is supported locally by our delivery managers who facilitate daily team collaboration, while our local IT and HR team provide local assistance for quick resolutions from any blockers.  

As your project and business evolve, you can scale up or adjust the size of your hub team without having to rebuild the structure from scratch. 

Remote teams – fully distributed, with the same level of dedication  

For clients who prefer not to rely on a physical hub, we also build remote dedicated tech teams.  

In this service:  

• Team members work remotely from locations where we have legal entities (Bulgaria, Poland, Ukraine) without going to the office.  

• The team is fully dedicated to your organisation and your projects. 

Despite being distributed, remote teams are designed to maintain high standards of collaboration, knowledge transfer, and alignment with your objectives. Communication, workflows, and documentation are set up to support long-term stability rather than short-term contracting. 

Just like the tech hubs, remote teams are backed by local delivery managers, who oversee operations and keep communication flowing, while our IT and HR team step in quickly to resolve IT or administrative obstacles. As your needs change, you can scale the remote team up or right-size it without restarting from zero, keeping knowledge and context inside the existing structure. 

The Build-Scale-Transfer model: Flexibility without lock-in  

Underpinning all three services is our Build–Scale–Transfer engagement model: 

• Build – We help you assemble the right team: individuals or full squads that match your technical needs and culture. 
• Scale – As your project grows, the team grows with it, following your roadmap and priorities. 
• Transfer – If you decide to bring the team in-house, you can transition them into direct employment within your organisation whenever you are ready, while preserving all the knowledge, relationships, and working practices you have developed together. 

During this transition, we support you with HR, legal, and IT so that the process is structured and smooth, not disruptive. 

This model aims to balance: 

• The flexibility and speed of working with an external partner  

• The long-term stability and ownership of an your exclusive team  

• A clear path that avoids the feeling of being “locked in” to a provider 

Bringing it all together 

The real cost of IT recruitment is not just a line in your budget. It is a combination of direct hiring cost, internal time, the impact of vacancy, the effort of onboarding and integration, and the risk and consequences of mis-hire.  

When you understand these layers, you can make more deliberate choices: which roles to hire directly, where to use partners, and when dedicated teams or alternative models will actually reduce your overall cost rather than simply shifting it. 

If you are exploring how to build or scale your tech capacity, whether through individual hires, dedicated teams in a tech hub, or fully remote squads, our role is to help you do it in a way that controls risk, protects knowledge, and fits your long-term plans. 

The goal is not just to fill roles, but to build teams that stay, deliver, and grow with your organisation.