The Cost of Hiring Most Businesses Never Calculate

Most Tampa Bay businesses know hiring takes time, but very few calculate what that time is actually costing them. Every hour a leader spends reviewing resumes, screening candidates, and conducting interviews is an hour pulled away from running the business.

The cost may never appear as a separate line item, but it’s real. The real question is how much the business spends before getting the right person hired—and internal leadership time is only part of it.

What Hiring Really Costs

In 2025, SHRM updated the average cost per hire in the United States and found that it costs $5,475 for non-executive roles and $35,879 for executive roles. (PIN) Now, I know the default for many business leaders hiring right now is going to be that AI will make that cost cheaper, let’s use AI. As the great Lee Corso liked to say on College Game Day…NOT SO FAST MY FRIEND. (Please forgive me, it’s August and I’m ready for college football!).

Recent studies show time-to-hire has slowed nationally (One Hour), while entry-level application volume has nearly tripled since 2022 because of AI and one-click applying (Stanford). More applications may sound like an advantage, but they create more resumes to review and more management-level time spent to identify qualified candidates.

We are in a game of cat and mouse. As businesses dive more deeply into using AI in the hiring process, candidates are doing the same to apply for roles. Because of that, internal hiring teams will have to do far more heavy lifting and research to ensure candidate resumes are honest and accurate – or risk making a bad hire. In my view, application volume and time-to-hire will continue to rise before they improve for those reasons.

But Wait – What Do You Mean They Said No?

Imagine the scenario: you have sifted through hundreds of resumes to get to 5 potential candidates. You interview all 5 candidates and bring 2 back for a final interview. Your team decides on one and… they say no. Now before you think that’s just crazy and it wouldn’t happen, check this out from Gartner: “48% of job candidates accepted their most recent job offer – a significant decrease from 54% in 4Q24 and 85% in 4Q23.”

To put this bluntly, what Gartner is saying is that 1 out of every 2 candidates is turning down offers today. As a matter of fact, it just happened to me right here in Pinellas County in the last month. We had a senior-level operational candidate who was interviewing for a newly created direct hire role and told their current employer they were interviewing.

Only after our client made an offer to the candidate did their current employer respond with a counteroffer. It was like a game of chicken. They didn’t want to increase the salary level until they had to, and did it only when it was required. The employee decided to stay with their current employer.

Since my team is handling that search, the employer didn’t lose weeks of internal recruiting time—we mitigated and assumed that risk. Our client may have spent a grand total of three hours on the search through interviews and discussions with us. But the need is still there and that opening continues to affect productivity and morale among employees who thought they were getting some relief from additional responsibilities they weren’t hired to handle.

For my team, restarting the search is what we do every day. For the client, it means more time to wait before a new employee is in place and the operational stress begins to ease. This is one of the great reasons why an outside recruiting firm can be valuable even with a capable HR team: it allows the search to continue without pulling internal employees away from their primary responsibilities.

How to Respond in This Market

1. Prioritize the Search

The very first thing I recommend to every client who calls us is to prioritize the search. Do not let it drag. Do not assume 10 better candidates will apply tomorrow.

Every delay increases your internal hiring costs, raises the risk of losing your best candidate, and adds another $500 a day in lost productivity. As I discussed in my previous newsletter, waiting for the perfect candidate can become very expensive.

2. Discount Rates Brings Discount Talent

The second thing I recommend is taking pressure off your HR team or hiring managers by using outside recruiting firms strategically. A capable internal team may be able to run the search. The real question is what that search is pulling them away from—and what happens if the chosen candidate says no and the entire process has to start over.

The right recruiting firm should work alongside your HR team, not replace it. Our role is to carry part of the recruiting workload, shorten the time to hire, and absorb some of the risk when a search does not go as planned.

We all understand that you cannot walk into a Mercedes dealership and negotiate a Hyundai price tag. Yet staffing firms are frequently treated as interchangeable, with the lowest-priced provider expected to deliver the same recruiting effort, screening, speed, and follow-up as a firm investing more heavily in the search. The same principle applies to compensation. If the pay is below the local market rate, no recruiting strategy can manufacture a strong, sustainable candidate pool.

3. Use Local Market Data

Speed and the right recruiting partner matter, but not if your search is built on wrong assumptions. Broad headlines deceive; fresh local data tells the truth.

When leaders see local unemployment tick up to 4.7% (BLS), they assume hiring is getting easier. But look at workforce growth and the illusion collapses: our local labor force grew by a meager 0.4% year-over-year, while the St. Petersburg–Clearwater side recorded 0.0% growth.

Tampa Bay’s Operational Reality:

Our talent pool clearly isn’t expanding. Over the past year the Tampa Bay MSA civilian labor force has only increased by 1,396 workers out of over 3 million people. Additionally, candidates are increasingly cautious about moving, and many are simply leveraging outside offers to trigger counteroffers from their current employers.

To win in this market, you have to prioritize your search, move decisively, and stay competitive on compensation. Holding out for a magic wave of active applicants only extends your $500-a-day vacancy drag. Better local data doesn’t eliminate hiring risk, but it does provide you the information you need to make the best-informed decision for your business, likely minimizing potential hiring mistakes.

Is Your Tampa Bay Position Still Open?

If your role has been open longer than expected, send me the job title and target pay range. I will tell you candidly whether the problem is likely to be pay, geography, process, or candidate availability—even if you decide to handle the search internally.