Best ats for staffing agencies
- The agency fee on one role
- $18,000
- Difference against filling it yourself
- $14,800
- A year of hiring at agency rates
- $108,000
- A year of hiring in-house, plus a recruiter
- $104,200
Every figure on this page is computed from the inputs entered, by the method stated below it. Reqnix publishes no salary data, no benchmark time to hire, no conversion rate you should expect and no employment law: the days, the costs, the scores and the weights are yours, and the defaults are a worked example to replace with your own.
The figures above start from a worked example ($18,000). Change any input and the answer updates as you type.
Download the Best ats for staffing agencies worked example (CSV)
The best ATS for a staffing agency is a different purchase from the best ATS for the company paying that agency, and this sheet is for the second one deciding whether to keep paying. Enter the starting salary, the agency's fee percentage, what it costs you to fill the same role in-house, the hires like this you make in a year, and what an in-house recruiter would cost. It returns the fee on one role, the difference against doing it yourself, a year of hiring each way, and the number of hires a year at which the recruiter pays for themselves. On the worked example, a $90,000 role at 20% is an $18,000 fee against $3,200 to fill it yourself: $14,800 of difference per role, and at $85,000 for a recruiter the break-even is 5.7 hires a year. Six hires a year makes the recruiter the cheaper option by $3,800; five makes the agency cheaper. That is the whole decision, and it is arithmetic.
The in-house number has to be honest
Take it from the cost per hire sheet on this site, with your own hours in it. Comparing a real agency invoice against an in-house cost that pretends recruiting is free produces an answer that is always the same and always wrong.
Break-even is a range, not a line
5.7 hires on the worked example. Below it the agency wins, above it the recruiter does, and near it the decision turns on things this sheet cannot weigh: how lumpy the hiring is, and whether you can keep a recruiter busy in a quiet quarter.
Agencies are not all or nothing
The most common honest answer is a recruiter for the roles you hire repeatedly and an agency for the rare and senior ones. Run the sheet twice, once per group, rather than once for everything.
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Best ats for staffing agencies: common questions
Is 20% the normal fee?
Contingency fees commonly sit somewhere between 15% and 25% of first-year salary, and executive search is usually higher and retained. This site publishes no benchmark: put in the number your agency actually charges you.
Should the rebate period change the maths?
It changes the risk rather than the price, and the contingency agreement sheet on this site works that side: what share of a fee is at risk through a rebate window.
What about the quality difference?
The sheet does not model it and will not pretend to. It gives you the money, so the quality argument can be had on its own terms rather than as a proxy for a cost nobody has calculated.