What a recruiter or screening software really costs a small business

The average recruiter salary in the US is $69,655 a year, according to Indeed’s 2026 data. A staffing agency will typically want 15-25% of whatever you’re paying the person they place, with 20% the number most agencies land on. Line those two up against a $49-a-month screening tool and the software looks like an obvious win. It’s the wrong comparison.

What actually matters is what each option costs the fifth time you hire the same role, not the first. And if you’re the person doing hiring for a small business, there’s almost always a fifth time.

Why “just hire a recruiter” feels cheaper than it is

When the candidate pile gets unmanageable, the instinct is to price out getting someone else to handle it, usually an in-house recruiter or an agency. A recruiter’s salary sounds steep next to a software subscription, so the software wins the comparison before you’ve even looked closer.

But a $69,655 salary isn’t a per-hire cost. It’s a fixed cost you’re paying every month, whether you have one open role or six, whether this is a busy hiring quarter or a quiet one. For a business filling three or four roles a year, that math doesn’t work. The common rule of thumb among hiring teams is that an in-house recruiter breaks even somewhere around 10 or more open roles a year, well above where most owner-run businesses sit.

An agency fixes the fixed-cost problem. You only pay when someone starts. That sounds like it should be the cheaper option for occasional hiring. It usually isn’t, and the reason has nothing to do with the percentage itself.

What a recruiter, an agency, and screening software actually cost

Here’s the real math behind each option, not the version that fits neatly on a slide.

The in-house recruiter

$69,655 a year is the base. Add payroll taxes and benefits, and most estimates put the fully loaded cost of a salaried employee at 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary. That puts a recruiter closer to $87,000-$97,500 a year before they’ve filled a single role. A recruiter is worth that money when there’s enough hiring volume to keep them busy. Below that line, you’re paying a full salary to do the job a $49-a-month tool can do for the roles you actually have open.

The staffing agency

Agencies charge 15-25% of first-year salary, 20% is the benchmark most contingency firms use. On a $50,000 role, that’s a $10,000 check the day someone starts, which looks cheaper than a recruiter’s salary if you’re only hiring once. The problem shows up the second time you fill the same role. The fee doesn’t go down. It resets to $10,000 again, and again, every time that role turns over.

There’s a second issue most owners find out the hard way. Agencies are built to chase their own economics, which means the highest-paying, hardest-to-fill roles get their attention first. A recurring, lower-wage role that a small business needs filled every few months, the front-desk, coordinator, or admin hire, is exactly the kind of search a lot of agencies would rather not take on. You’re paying a premium fee for a search that isn’t the agency’s priority. Small staffing agencies running this same math for their own clients hit the identical wall: the fee model rewards big, hard placements, not the steady, repeat volume that actually pays the bills.

The screening software

Truffle prices screening by the credit, not by the hire or the headcount. Resume screening runs 1 credit, an assessed candidate is 2, and a completed one-way interview is 5, all pulled from one shared monthly pool. Plans start at $49 a month for 200 credits, enough for one to three roles depending on how deep you screen. A full three-layer screen, resumes plus interviews plus assessments, runs about 150 credits for a typical role. Fill the same role four times a year and you’re still well inside a single month’s pool on the $119-a-month plan (or $99 billed annually), which covers 600 credits a month.

The real difference is how each price behaves when you hire again

Line the three options up side by side and the day-one number is almost beside the point. What matters is what happens to that number the second, third, and tenth time you hire.

A recruiter’s salary is fixed. It needs volume to make sense, and most small businesses don’t have it.

An agency’s fee is a percentage, so it scales with your business in the wrong direction. The more often you hire the same role, the more that 20% adds up, and it never gets cheaper per hire no matter how many times you’ve bought it before.

A credit-based subscription is flat. It doesn’t care whether this is your first hire this year or your fifth. The price you pay in month one is close to the price you pay in month twelve, and every credit you don’t use this month rolls forward instead of disappearing.

This is the piece the generic “recruiter vs. software” cost comparisons usually miss, because most of them are written for a company staffing up a hiring function, not for the owner who inherited hiring on top of a job that was already full. The businesses that actually re-hire the same roles over and over, which is most small businesses, are the ones a fixed salary and a percentage fee are worst suited to.

The honest objection about hiring that isn’t steady

A fair pushback: hiring isn’t always steady. Some months you’re filling two roles, some months none. Doesn’t a flat monthly subscription have the same fixed-cost problem as a recruiter’s salary?

Almost, except for two differences. First, a 7-day free trial with 30 credits and no card gets you through your next hiring push without committing to anything. Second, on Core and above, unused credits roll over for up to a year, capped at three times your plan’s monthly pool, so a quiet month isn’t wasted spend the way a recruiter’s idle salary is. You’re not paying for a person to sit around between reqs. You’re banking screening capacity for the next time the pile shows up.

A recruiter’s salary keeps running in the slow months. An agency relationship has to be rebuilt and repriced every time you go back to them. Credits are the only one of the three that actually flexes with a hiring pattern that isn’t steady.

What this actually looks like for a repeat, low-volume hire

Picture a business that fills the same coordinator role, paying around $50,000, three or four times a year because of normal turnover on a small team. That’s a common pattern for the front-desk, sales, and admin roles a lot of owner-run businesses re-post constantly.

A recruiter costs roughly $87,000-$97,500 a year fully loaded, whether that role turns over once or six times. Divided across three hires, that’s close to $30,000 spent finding each person, more than half the role’s own salary.

An agency at 20% costs $10,000 per hire. Fill the role three times and that’s $30,000 for the year, and the fee starts over from zero on hire number four next year.

Screening it with Truffle instead looks different in practice. You upload the pile of resumes for the role, and AI Match ranks every candidate against the criteria you set for that position, not a generic template. A one-way interview replaces the round of phone screens you’d otherwise book one at a time, and Candidate Shorts let you review the top of the list in a few minutes instead of watching every recording start to finish. Three roles a year, screened this thoroughly, lands well inside a single month’s credit pool on Core, which runs $99 a month billed annually. That’s under $1,200 for the year, covering this hire and the next one, and the one after that.

None of this replaces judgment. You still watch the interviews you decide to watch, and you still make the call. What changes is who reads the other 140 resumes first.

Software finally has a cost structure built for how small businesses hire

Recruiter salaries and agency fees weren’t priced badly. They were priced for a different buyer, a company with enough hiring volume to make a fixed salary worth it, or enough budget to treat a 20% fee as a rounding error on one hard search. Neither model was ever built around a business that reposts the same role every quarter forever.

Skipping paid help entirely and just moving fast on gut instinct carries its own price tag, and it’s a steep one. A bad hire is expensive in ways that dwarf any screening cost. One widely cited estimate from SHRM, attributed to Link Humans CEO Jörgen Sundberg, puts the full cost of a bad hire, recruiting, salary, onboarding, and lost productivity combined, as high as $240,000 in the worst cases. Skipping screening to save $49 a month is a false economy next to that number.

What’s changed is that recruitment software built for small business hiring patterns finally prices the work the way a repeat, low-volume hirer actually experiences it. You pay for the screening you use this month, not a salary you’re carrying every month or a fee that resets every time. If you’re the person who ends up doing hiring on top of your real job, that’s the piece that was missing from the math all along, a cost structure that finally matches how often you actually hire.

Frequently asked questions about hiring a recruiter vs. buying screening software

Is it cheaper to hire a recruiter or use a staffing agency?

It depends on how often you hire. A recruiter is a fixed salary, so it only pays for itself once you have enough open roles to keep them busy, usually cited around 10 or more a year. An agency charges 15-25% of first-year salary per hire, which is fine for a one-off search but adds up fast on a role you fill repeatedly.

What percentage do staffing agencies typically charge?

Most contingency agencies charge 15-25% of a candidate’s first-year salary, with 20% the most common benchmark. Specialized or hard-to-fill roles can run higher, sometimes 25-30%, regardless of how junior the position is.

How much does an in-house recruiter cost, fully loaded?

The average US recruiter salary is $69,655 a year, according to Indeed’s 2026 data. Add payroll taxes and benefits and the fully loaded cost per hire typically runs 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary, so closer to $87,000-$97,500 a year before that person has filled a single role.

Is screening software cheaper than a recruiter for a small business?

For a business hiring a handful of roles a year rather than a handful a month, usually yes, because software charges for the screening work itself instead of a fixed salary or a percentage of every offer. It won’t replace a recruiter’s judgment or an agency’s network for a hard, specialized search. It replaces the part of the job that’s actually a volume problem, reading every resume and running the first interview.

Ready to see what a real role would cost to screen? Start a 7-day free trial with 30 credits and no card required.