An ROI model with nothing hidden inside it

Desk size, in recruiters, and whether they are perm, contract or both. Placements per year, either per recruiter or for the team. Average fee per permanent placement and average weekly margin per contractor, both of which the placement fee calculator will help you establish if you have not written them down. Fully loaded cost per recruiter, meaning salary plus employer costs plus commission plus the seat, not the salary line.

Then the part everyone skips: how a recruiter week is actually spent. You allocate the hours across sourcing and search, screening and calls, administration and data entry, client work and business development, interview coordination, and reporting. The allocation is yours, and if you do not know it, that is itself the most useful output of the exercise.

Revenue models on a recruitment desk are simple: placements times fee, contractors times weekly margin times weeks out. The interesting question is not that arithmetic, it is what a recruiter would do with an hour that came back. An hour returned from data entry is only worth something if it goes into activity that produces placements, and on a desk that is short of live requisitions rather than short of time, it does not.

So the model asks you to say which recovered hours convert into billable activity and which do not, and it applies your figure rather than an assumed one. A desk with more roles than it can work converts recovered time efficiently. A desk waiting on client decisions converts almost none of it. Both are real situations, and a calculator that assumes the first one for everybody is the reason these tools have a poor reputation.

The output shows the revenue effect at your conversion assumption, and shows it again at half that figure and at zero, so you can see the shape of the model rather than a single confident number.

The result page lists the assumptions in a table beside the output, with the value you entered and what it feeds into. There is no hidden coefficient, no industry adjustment factor, and no default that appears in the maths but not in the interface. If a number affects the result, it is visible and you put it there.

The output is also exportable with the assumptions attached, because an ROI figure separated from its inputs is not evidence of anything. If you are taking this to a finance partner or a board, they will ask what the model assumed, and the answer needs to be in the same document as the number. A calculator that hands you a headline figure and no working is handing you something you cannot defend.

Ask what the time saving assumption is and where it came from. If the answer is a survey the vendor commissioned or a case study with one customer in it, treat it as marketing rather than measurement. Ask what happens to the result when you halve that assumption; if the payback period is still acceptable, the case is probably real, and if it collapses, the case was the assumption.

Ask whether the model counts the cost of getting there. Migration, data cleaning, configuration, training and the productivity dip in the first weeks are real and they land in the same year as the licence fee. Ask whether the revenue upside assumes demand you actually have. And ask whether the comparison is against your current system properly costed, including the spreadsheets and the manual work that sit around it, or against a straw man.

Our calculator includes fields for switching cost and a ramp period for the same reason. A model that only counts benefits is not a model.

The calculator will process what you enter to produce the result and will not retain it. Nothing is written to a Surhires account, no account is required to run it, and running it does not put you into a sales sequence. If you choose to email yourself the result, that is an action you take deliberately and the email address is used for that.

The figures here are commercially sensitive to you rather than personal data about somebody else. Fully loaded recruiter cost, average fee and placement volume describe your business, and you should apply the same judgement to putting them in a free web tool that you would apply to any external system. If you add a recruiter's name or a client's name to keep rows legible, you have introduced third-party data, and that decision is yours as controller. References work as well as names.

It will not tell you that Surhires will save your desk a specific percentage of anything. We do not have that figure, we are not going to estimate it, and a vendor who gives you one without a study behind it is telling you something about their marketing rather than about your desk.

It will not model the value of a placement you would not otherwise have made, because that is unfalsifiable and it is where most vendor ROI models get their impressive numbers. It will not price your licence for you, since pricing depends on plan and seat count and sits on the pricing page. And it will not decide whether to buy anything. It will show you what your own assumptions imply, which is the most any calculator on a vendor website should claim to do.