NP Hiring

For Employers

What a hire actually costs you

A flat-fee posting, sponsored ads, and an agency search, side by side on cost per applicant and cost per hire — with an optional overlay for what the empty seat is costing while you wait.

We sell postings, so we publish no benchmarks. Our prices are filled in because we can prove them; every figure for the other two channels comes from your invoices, and a channel you leave empty says “not comparable” instead of showing a zero.

We sell job postings, so here is how this stays honest. The only prices filled in for you are ours, and they are the prices our checkout actually charges. We publish no benchmark for what a sponsored click, an agency fee, or a time-to-fill “usually” costs — every figure in the other two columns is one you enter from your own invoices, and a column with nothing entered says so instead of showing a zero.

Your hiring plan

Applies to every channel — the same roles filled three different ways.

How many openings this plan covers.

Usually 1. Raise it if one posting reliably fills several seats.

Flat-fee posting on NP Hiring

$199 per post for 60 days ($3 a day), $179 to renew, and 25 candidate unlocks plus 25 direct messages included. Your organization’s first post is free for 30 days: 1 free post per employer email domain, lifetime, shared across everyone at your organization.

Starts at 25 because that is how many candidate unlocks a posting includes — a plan feature, not a benchmark. Replace it with what your postings actually draw.

Each renewal adds $179 and another 60 days.

Sponsored / cost-per-click, from your invoice

Leave at zero to leave this channel out of the comparison.

Total you spent on paid clicks for one comparable role. Read it off the invoice rather than estimating.

Completed applications, not clicks or impressions — your ATS knows this number.

Agency / contingency search, from your agreement

Leave the rate at zero to leave this channel out of the comparison.

The percentage of first-year base in your signed agreement. We publish no typical rate — this has to come from your paperwork.

Starts at the cited national median (BLS OEWS, Nurse Practitioners (29-1171) — median annual wage, May 2024). Replace it with your budgeted base.

Optional: what the vacancy itself costs

Zero by default, which switches the overlay off entirely. Only you know what an unfilled seat costs per day — coverage, lost visit revenue, overtime — and we will not guess it for you. The three time-to-fill fields start at our 60-day posting window, which is a product fact rather than a market average, and the same number for all three channels so the default cannot favour one.

Coverage, lost revenue, or overtime for one open seat, per day.

Days from posting to accepted offer, on your own history.

Days from launching the campaign to accepted offer.

Days from engaging the agency to accepted offer.

Your cost per hire, flat-fee posting

$0

1 free post, 0 paid posts at $199 and 0 renewals at $179 — $0 total. That is the free first post doing the work — it is a real price, but it is a one-off for your whole organization rather than a rate, so model your second role too.

Cost per hire by channel. Flat-fee figures are priced from our published rates; the other two rows use only the numbers you entered.
ChannelSpendApplicantsPer applicantPer hirePer hire + vacancy (off)
Flat-fee posting$025$0$0—
Sponsored / cost-per-clickNot comparable — Enter the sponsored spend per role from your own invoice.
Agency / contingency searchNot comparable — Enter the contingency rate in your agency agreement.

Cost per hire is spend divided by hires, and nothing else. It says nothing about candidate quality, retention, or the recruiter time each channel consumes — an agency fee buys screening work that a posting does not, and this comparison cannot price that. Weigh it alongside the number, not against it.

How this comparison is built

One channel here is ours. That is exactly why the method is spelled out: you should be able to check every number we assert and replace every number we do not.

What it assumes

  • Cost per hire is total channel spend divided by hires. Cost per applicant is total channel spend divided by applicants. Nothing else is folded in.
  • Our own prices are read from the pricing config the checkout charges against: $199 per post for 60 days, $179 per renewal, and 25 candidate unlocks plus 25 direct messages included per posting.
  • The free post is scoped to the employer's email domain rather than to a login: 1 free post per employer email domain, lifetime, shared across everyone at your organization, and it runs 30 days. A five-recruiter health system therefore gets one free post between all five, not one each — so a multi-role plan modelled here shows at most 1 free posting and prices every other post at $199.
  • Every figure for the sponsored-ad and agency channels is yours. We publish no typical cost per click, no typical contingency rate, no typical time-to-fill, and no typical applicant-to-hire ratio — we sell one side of this comparison, and a benchmark from us would not be evidence.
  • A channel with nothing entered is reported as not comparable, never as zero. A zero in a cost column would read as free.
  • The applicant-volume default of 25 is the number of candidate unlocks a posting includes — a plan feature, not an expected response rate. Replace it with what your own postings draw.
  • Time-to-fill defaults to 60 days, which is the paid posting's run length rather than a market average, and it is applied identically to all three channels so the default cannot tilt the result. The vacancy overlay only affects anything once you enter a cost per day unfilled, which starts at zero.
  • First-year base — the figure an agency contingency rate is applied to — starts at the cited national median of $129,210 (BLS OEWS, Nurse Practitioners (29-1171) — median annual wage, May 2024). Replace it with your budgeted base.

What it does not include

  • Candidate quality and retention. A cheaper hire that leaves in four months is not cheaper, and this calculator cannot see that.
  • Your own team’s time. Screening, scheduling, and interviewing all cost money, and they differ sharply between channels — an agency fee buys screening work a posting does not.
  • Any benchmark for what other employers pay per click, per applicant, or in agency fees. We do not have defensible figures for those and will not print undefensible ones.
  • Sourcing tools, ATS subscriptions, careers-site costs, and referral bonuses. Add them as part of a channel’s spend if you want them counted.
  • Offer declines and backfills. Both raise real cost per hire, and both are specific to your process.

Sources

Questions about hiring cost

How is cost per hire calculated?
Total spend on a channel divided by the hires that channel produced. This calculator does that for three channels side by side and adds an optional overlay for the cost of the seat sitting empty: time-to-fill multiplied by what a day of vacancy costs you. It deliberately stops there. Formulas that fold in recruiter salaries, ATS licences, and overhead produce a bigger number that is harder to check and impossible to compare between employers — if you want those included, add them to a channel's spend yourself.
Why does this not tell me the typical cost per hire in healthcare?
Because we sell one of the channels being compared, and a benchmark published by an interested party is not evidence. Every industry cost-per-hire figure you will find comes from a survey with its own definition of which costs count, and quoting one here would let us pick the definition that flatters us. The comparison is built entirely from prices we can prove — ours — plus numbers you read off your own invoices and ATS.
Is a flat-fee posting really cheaper than an agency?
Not in the abstract, no — we sell one side of that comparison and we have not measured the other, so any margin we quoted you would be marketing rather than a finding. What we can hand you instead is the arithmetic. A contingency fee is a percentage of a first-year salary, so it scales with the salary; a posting is a fixed $199 per post that does not. The calculator totals our side from our published rates — posts, renewals, and the one free post per domain if it is still available — and prints that as the cost per hire your other channels have to beat, then applies your own contingency rate to your own base. The verdict is yours and it is about your roles. Spend is also not the whole comparison. A contingency agency does the sourcing and first-pass screening, carries the risk of not placing anyone, and is paid only on a hire; a posting puts the role in front of candidates and leaves the screening with you. The right question is not which is cheaper but whether the fee difference is worth more to you than the work it buys — which is why the calculator prints the number and then tells you what the number leaves out.
What should I use for time-to-fill?
Your own history, from the day a role opened to the day an offer was accepted. The field starts at 60 days only because that is how long a paid posting runs — it is a product fact standing in for a number we do not have, and it is applied to all three channels equally so it cannot favour one. Time-to-fill has no effect on the result until you enter what a day of vacancy costs you.
How do I work out what a day of vacancy costs?
Start with what you are actually spending to cover the gap: locum or agency coverage day rates, overtime for the staff absorbing the work, or the visit revenue the empty schedule is not generating. Whatever you use, it is your figure and only yours — the default is zero, and with it at zero the vacancy columns stay switched off rather than showing an invented cost.
What does a posting include?
A paid post runs 60 days at $199, is featured, and includes 25 candidate profile unlocks and 25 direct messages. Renewing costs $179. Those are the prices in the calculator, read from the same config the checkout uses, so they cannot drift from what you would actually be charged.
Who exactly gets the free post?
Your employer email domain does, not your login: 1 free post per employer email domain, lifetime, shared across everyone at your organization. It runs 30 days rather than the 60 a paid post gets, and it does not reset for each new recruiter who signs up — if a health system with five recruiters fills five roles, one of those posts is free and the other four are $199 each. That matters when you model a multi-role plan here, so untick the free-post box in the calculator if anyone at your domain has already used it.

Next steps for hiring teams

Salary benchmark

Median and quartile posted pay by state, before you set a range.

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Pricing

The rates this calculator uses, in full.

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How to hire guide

Screening, interviewing, and offer mechanics for these roles.

Open

Post a role

Your organization’s first posting is free.

Open

For employers

What the board does for hiring teams.

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Employer resources

Templates, guides, and benchmarks in one place.

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