Active Candidates Cost You Twice.
A longer search. Then an early exit. Most founders never add both numbers together. Run your own audit below — it takes under 5 minutes.
Your Hiring Profile
Most scaling tech companies fill 60–80% of roles reactively. The 30% who are actively looking tend to be over-represented on job boards — which means the pool skews toward people in transition, not people in flow.
Early Attrition
Reactively sourced hires show 28–40% first-year attrition in engineering. Passively sourced hires show 12–18%. The gap is the cost of urgency.
Specialist Role Search Premium
Fully-loaded cost is salary plus employer taxes, benefits, tools, and management overhead. A multiplier of ×1.3 means every unit of base salary costs about 1.30 all-in — typical for European tech companies.
The 20% specialist premium is applied to the additional days of vacancy cost — a longer timeline, not a higher fee, though those often compound.
Switching to a proactive hiring strategy for your next 12 months could recover approximately €0 — before accounting for the compounding benefit of a pipeline you own.
The "expensive" proactive approach suddenly looks cheap.
Recberry's TA Efficiency Framework builds the proactive pipeline inside your org — so the next critical hire comes from a warm relationship, not a job board. Fixed fee. Barush-led. You own everything at the end.
- Passive talent pipelines built months before you need them
- Passively sourced hires retain 40–60% longer — compounding over time
- No ongoing retainer — one fixed-fee engagement, full knowledge transfer
- 8–12 week deployment, results visible before it ends
Estimates are illustrative. Attrition benchmarks vary by market, role seniority, and company stage. Replacement cost range (50–200% of salary): SHRM, LinkedIn Talent Solutions, and Bersin by Deloitte research. 20% specialist search premium: LinkedIn Business Global Talent Trends Research Report. Proactive hire retention advantage: LinkedIn Global Talent Trends; Lever Talent Benchmarks Report.