The short answer
Compare in-house recruiting and outsourcing on total cost per hire. Include not just external invoices, but internal hours, ad spend, and tools you use.
What you pay an agency
A recruitment agency typically works on a percentage of the placed candidate's gross annual salary. That figure is transparent. What you get for it: a recruiter who searches, selects, and pre-qualifies. What you rarely get back is insight. Which candidates did you miss? Why did people drop out? What did they say about the role? The conversation disappears the moment the recruiter hangs up.
Agencies can move quickly, especially when they have the right network for your type of role. But every new recruitment round starts from scratch.
What to factor in when recruiting in-house
Recruiting through social media costs money too: advertising budget, the time of an HR professional or line manager, tools for communication and screening. Those costs are spread across different lines, which makes them harder to track.
There is a distinction that goes beyond budget lines. Those who recruit in-house build something: candidate data, conversation insights, an understanding of what works on which channel. That stays within the organisation. The question is not only: what does this hire cost? But also: what does it give me for the next one?
Concrete trade-offs
Urgency. An agency can deliver quickly when it has the right networks. Recruiting through social media requires a run-up: building the campaign, defining your audience, starting a conversation with people who are not actively looking.
Scarcity of the target audience. In technical roles – think of a service engineer or project planner – most suitable candidates are already employed somewhere. They will not be found on a job board. Social recruitment reaches them anyway, because the content appears where people already spend their time: on their phone, in their timeline. A traditional agency recruits largely from the same pool of active job-seekers.
Internal capacity. Recruiting in-house takes time from people who have other responsibilities too. If the HR function is thinly staffed, or if managers conduct the follow-up interviews themselves, that is a real cost.
Repetition. For organisations that regularly need people in similar roles, investing in an in-house recruitment approach pays off more than it does for an organisation that hires once every three years.
How Red Rocket works
At Red Rocket, an AI recruiter conducts the first conversation with candidates via WhatsApp, at any time of day. No standard intake form: the AI follows up based on the context of your organisation and qualifies candidates against the criteria you have set yourself.
What you find in the Cockpit afterwards: the candidate profile, the full conversation transcript, any CV that was submitted, a score, and suggested questions for the follow-up interview. That follow-up interview is yours to conduct. In person, with the information you need to make a sound judgement.
Hypothetical example: suppose you are looking for a technical field sales representative. During the conversation, the AI probes further on experience with specific installations, geographic availability, and motivation for making the move. You receive an overview and decide for yourself who to take forward. No rounds of phone calls. No time lost on candidates who would have dropped out early.
Step by step: making a fair comparison
- Map your current recruitment costs. Add up staff hours, advertising costs, and tool licences. Calculate this per hire over the past twelve months.
- Add indirect costs. Time-to-fill has a price. An open position in a small technical team has a direct impact on output or client satisfaction.
- Decide what you want to build. A one-off need or a recurring one? That partly determines whether investing in in-house recruitment capacity will pay for itself.
- Test one approach in practice. A pilot gives more reliable results than a calculation on paper. Run a social recruitment campaign and compare the outcome – not only in cost, but also in the quality of the candidates you reach.
Frequently asked questions
Is recruiting through social media always cheaper?
Not necessarily. The total cost depends on advertising budget, internal time investment, and how quickly the role is filled. For roles with higher volume or a less scarce talent pool, recruiting in-house often works out cheaper. For specialist roles where an agency demonstrably has a network in exactly that audience, the calculation can fall differently.
What if the candidate turns out not to be the right fit?
Neither an agency nor an in-house recruitment process guarantees a strong cultural fit or lasting success. The quality of the follow-up interview – which you conduct yourself – is what matters most. Good pre-qualification increases the likelihood that you spend your interview time on people worth considering. No recruitment model offers more certainty than that.
Can I combine both approaches?
You can. Some organisations use social recruitment for higher volumes or less scarce roles and bring in an agency for specific specialisms where they have no reach of their own. That does require clarity about which approach you use when, so that you can compare outcomes properly. --- More background on choosing between approaches and the cost structures involved: the guides on recruitment costs and recruitment marketing versus agency go into more detail.
