What You're Actually Paying For:

Why Flat-Rate Hiring Beats Per-Hire Costs

When you're hiring in construction, you're paying somebody, somehow, somewhere. A job board charges you a monthly fee whether you get five good applicants or fifty bad ones. A staffing agency takes a cut of that person's salary, whether they last six months or six years. Word of mouth doesn't cost anything until you're three weeks into your search with no leads and a job that still needs to be filled.

The real question isn't which option costs less. It's, what are you actually paying for with the different options?

Job boards get you volume. But you don't get to choose how much or how good.

Some job boards charge you monthly per posting, some charge per listing per day, but either way, you don't get to control who shows up or whether they're any good. Some boards will let you add screening questions, but candidates are answering based on what your posting already told them you want to hear. So it's not a real match; it's a guess dressed up as a checklist.

Here's what a few of the boards you've probably used actually run and what you're paying for:

Job Boards	Typical Monthly Cost	What You Actually Get
Indeed (Sponsored)	$5/day is the technical minimum, but real-world spend runs anywhere from $5 to $47 a day, depending on how much visibility and volume you actually need	Pay-per-click bidding, not guaranteed placement. Once your daily budget is spent, your post drops out of sponsored visibility for the rest of that day, whether or not a good candidate was about to see it
ZipRecruiter	Roughly $300-$400/month per active posting; no guaranteed visibility	Distribution to 100+ sites, but no filter for actual trade skill. Employers hiring skilled trades often get applications from retail and food service instead. Limited candidates in rural communities.
ConstructionJobs.com	Starts around $375 for a single post	A construction-specific audience, still resume-based

None of these changes the actual problem. You're paying more to get more resumes, but not paying anything to know if the person behind the resume is a fit. And with the pay-per-click boards, you're not even paying for guaranteed visibility; you're paying for however much visibility your budget buys before it runs out for the day.

And that's before you even get to the resume itself. You don't actually know who wrote it. Could be the candidate. Could be an AI tool that cleaned it up or built it from scratch. Could be their spouse, their sister, a friend who's good with words. A resume tells you someone knew the right things to type. It doesn't tell you whether the person behind it can actually do the work.

You're still doing all the real sorting yourself. You're just paying for the privilege of a bigger pile of resumes to sort through.

Staffing agencies sell you a placement, not a fit.

Percentage-of-salary pricing means the agency gets paid when someone starts, not when someone stays. Industry-wide, direct-hire placement fees typically run 15 to 30 percent of that person's first-year salary. Take a $55,000-a-year framer as an example: that's $8,250 to $16,500, due whether the hire lasts two years or two months. Sometimes you get a 30-day guarantee, but it typically takes 90 days just to see if someone is going to be a strong fit.

Here's the part most people never stop to do the math on. That same fee covers roughly 24 to 47 months of flat-rate access with us. Call it two to nearly four years of an ongoing pipeline, for what one agency placement costs you, with no long-term guarantee that it sticks.

That's not a knock on every agency out there; it's just how the incentive is built.

The cost only makes sense if the hire works out long-term.

Flat-rate access sells you an ongoing pipeline.

At Plenty of Hires, it's $349 a month. Not per hire. Not a percentage. Not a bigger number if your search runs long or you need to fill five jobs. You get continuous access to candidates who've already completed a Job Fit Assessment, matched to your role on skills, work environment, and the kind of crew they actually want to be part of, not just what's on a piece of paper. And that pipeline doesn't stop after your first hire. It keeps running in the background, so the next time you need someone, you're not starting over.

That means the same monthly cost whether you make one hire or five. Whether the search takes a week or six. You're not paying more because hiring got harder that quarter.

And it's not a one-time list you burn through and refill yourself. Candidates stay active in our candidate pool and are matched against your openings for 60 days after completing their assessment, and new matches come in daily or weekly, depending on the role. That means you're never starting from scratch any time you need to hire. The pipeline is already running before you even know you'll need it.

Right now, that access starts with a 7-day free trial, followed by $99 a month for your first three months. After that, it moves to the standard $349 a month rate. No contracts. Cancel anytime.

The real comparison isn't the monthly number. It's what you're exposed to if the hire doesn't work.

A bad hire from a job board costs you the board's fee, plus the interview time, plus the onboarding time, plus starting over. A bad hire from a staffing agency costs you the placement fee on top of all of that. A flat monthly rate doesn't erase the cost of a bad fit, but it means your hiring budget isn't tied to how many times you have to try.

Building a crew that fits isn't about finding the cheapest way to fill a seat. It's about not paying twice for the same job and not starting from zero every time you need to hire. One agency placement can cost you what two to four years of an ongoing pipeline costs with us. That's the number worth sitting with next time a hire falls through.

If you're tired of starting from zero every time a position opens up, that's one of the problems we're out to solve. Try it free for 7 days and see who's already sitting in the pipeline for you.

Start Matching with Candidates → app.plentyofhires.com