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What Your Cybersecurity Recruitment Process Actually Costs — and How to Cut It in Half

Why the true cost of filling a single cybersecurity role dwarfs the recruiter's invoice, and what a verification-first talent model could mean for your budget, your risk posture, and your sanity.

The Number Your CFO Doesn't See

You know what you pay your contingency recruiter. It is 20%–25% of base salary — $28,000 to $35,000 for a mid-level Security Engineer at $140,000. It is a large, visible number that arrives on a predictable invoice. You may even have negotiated it down a point or two.

What you almost certainly have not calculated is the full cost of getting that hire into a chair, productive, and still with you twelve months later. That number is not on any invoice. It is scattered across budget lines that belong to HR, IT, facilities, your security team's operational tempo, and — most expensively — the probabilistic cost of the hire not working out. When you assemble the complete picture, the figure is sobering.

A single mid-level cybersecurity hire, fully loaded and risk-adjusted, costs your organisation approximately $144,000–$181,000.

The recruiter's fee is less than 20% of that total.

If you are a CISO, a VP of Security, or