Demand Recruiting × Novature Solutions
Every hire costs something to get right the first time. The expensive part is what happens if they leave and you have to do it again, and that second cost is exactly what good onboarding and clear systems are built to prevent. Drag the sliders to match your numbers.
Base salary for the role
An agency fee, or the value of your own (or your team's) time spent sourcing, screening, and interviewing. Contingency agency fees typically run 15-20% of first-year salary; retained/executive search runs 25-35%, with a third of first-year comp as the common industry reference point.
Weeks until they're fully ramped. Studies put this at 1-3 months for entry-level roles, 3-6 months mid-level, and 6-12 months for senior or technical roles.
Weeks the seat sits empty. SHRM's 2026 benchmark puts median time-to-fill at 39 days (about 5.5 weeks) for non-executive roles, often longer for specialized or technical roles.
Whoever is actually spending time getting this person up to speed, usually the manager, sometimes a senior teammate.
The real hours spent on 1:1s, shadowing, answering questions, and reviewing work. This is not a formal training budget line, just the time that actually goes to it.
How long that hands-on level of support actually lasts. Usually front-loaded into the first several weeks, not spread evenly across the whole ramp.
$0
What you'd spend once, regardless of how it turns out. It's the baseline cost of getting anyone into the seat, up to speed, and actually supported while they get there.
$0
Largely avoidable. It comes down when the role has real onboarding, clear expectations, and someone paying attention early, not luck.
Getting the hire right
A recruiter who actually screens for the role instead of a resume gets someone who can do the job in the seat. That's the cost in blue, and it's unavoidable.
Keeping them
The cost in yellow is what shows up when onboarding is an afterthought. Real ramp plans, clear expectations, and someone actually managing the first 90 days are what keep that number from happening at all.
Want the next hire to stick?
If the blue and yellow numbers are further apart than you expected, a short conversation about the role and the first 90 days can close the gap.
Where these numbers come from
The 50% ramp-productivity assumption is a standard planning convention (not tied to one study), used to translate ramp time into a dollar figure. The mentoring & support formula (mentor's hourly rate × hours/week × weeks of active support) is modeled from Laura Paget's (Novature Solutions) onboarding practice, not a published study. It's the piece most calculators skip entirely. If your numbers land far outside the 50-200%-of-salary range research cites for total turnover cost, that's a good prompt to sanity-check your slider inputs.
Helping B2B SaaS founders and GTM leaders hire the sales, marketing, and RevOps people who move growth forward.
