Recruiting teams tend to report what the ATS makes easy to report: applications, interviews, hires. Finance leaders tend to ignore those reports, and they are right to. An application count says nothing about cost, risk or revenue. If you want a CFO to read your hiring report, it has to speak in their units. Here are the five numbers that do, how to calculate each one, and how to put them on a single page.
1. Cost of an open role, per day
This is the number that reframes everything else. Take a role, estimate what it produces or what it costs to cover while empty, and divide by working days. A vacant delivery driver route might cost 400 dollars a day in overtime and missed deliveries. A vacant sales seat might cost several thousand in pipeline not worked. Multiply by average days open and you have a vacancy cost the CFO can put next to your job board budget. Suddenly a 3,000 dollar sponsored posting that trims ten days off a fill looks cheap.
2. Time-to-fill, as a trend and a distribution
A single average hides the story. Report the median, the 90th percentile, and the trend over the last six months. A median of 24 days with a 90th percentile of 71 days says most roles are fine and a handful are stuck. Those stuck roles are where the vacancy cost piles up. Break it down by department or location only if the CFO asks; the first page should be the company number.
- Median time-to-fill, this quarter versus last.
- The five longest open roles, with days open and estimated vacancy cost.
- One sentence on why each of the five is stuck.
3. Cost per hire, fully loaded
Include job board spend, agency fees, assessment tools, software, and recruiter time at a loaded hourly rate. Divide by hires in the period. Then split it by source. Illustratively, if referral hires cost 900 dollars each and agency hires cost 14,000, and the two groups perform about the same after six months, you have a budget argument that needs no further slides. Source effectiveness reporting in Apex ATS does the sourcing half of this automatically, tracking each hire back to the board, social post or referral it came from; you add the spend.
4. Stage drop-off, translated into money
Funnel conversion is a recruiting metric until you attach a cost. If 30 percent of candidates who reach the offer stage decline, and each one who declines restarts a 20 day search, that decline rate is a vacancy cost multiplier. Report the stage with the worst drop-off, the reason you believe it happens (pay, speed, competing offers), and what it would cost to fix. Finance is usually willing to fund a fix when the cost of not fixing it is on the same page.
The report I want is one page. What is empty, what it is costing us, what you are doing about it, and what you need. If it takes more than that, I assume you do not know.
CFO, mid-market services firm (illustrative)
5. 90 day retention of new hires
A hire who leaves in the first 90 days is a full cost per hire spent twice, plus the vacancy cost in between. Pull this from your HRIS or payroll integration so it is not self-reported. Report the rate, the trend, and the split by source. It is common to find that one job board produces plenty of hires and a much worse early attrition rate than another. That is the kind of finding that changes budget allocation for next year.
Putting it on one page
- 01Top row: open roles, total estimated vacancy cost this month, median time-to-fill.
- 02Middle: cost per hire by source, and 90 day retention by source, side by side.
- 03Bottom: the worst drop-off stage, what it costs, and the proposed fix with a price.
- 04Footer: two sentences. What changed since last month, and what you are asking for.
Keep the definitions stable. If time-to-fill starts at requisition approval this month, it starts there next month too. A CFO who catches a definition change will stop trusting the whole report.
Hiring is one of the largest controllable costs in most companies and one of the least reported in financial terms. Fix that, and the recruiting team stops being a cost center that asks for money and starts being a function that shows where the money goes. That is a much better conversation to have in a budget meeting.