Screening the applicants is the part that got cheap. LinkedIn, SEEK and most applicant tracking systems will cut a pile of applications down to a shortlist for you. What they do not do is the next step: a consultant picks up the phone and asks each person on that shortlist the same handful of things. Do you have the right to work here? What is your notice period? What are you looking for? Tell me about the last deal, the last site, the last team you ran. Twenty minutes later, a few lines of notes, and on to the next.
It is valuable work. It is also the most repetitive hour in the week, and because it never appears on an invoice, most agencies have never priced it.
The arithmetic
Three inputs:
- Candidates phoned per role. Not applicants: the shortlist your screening leaves you with, the people you would call.
- Minutes per call. Include the notes, the dialling and the call-back. A fifteen-minute conversation is rarely a fifteen-minute job.
- What an hour of a consultant costs you. Loaded, not the salary: package, super and overheads, divided by the hours they actually work.
Multiply the first two for minutes, divide by sixty for hours, multiply by the third for dollars. Fifty candidates at twenty minutes is 1,000 minutes, about 16.7 hours. At A$60 an hour, that is A$1,000, for one role, before anyone has met the client. The A$60 is an example, not a benchmark: put your own in.
Here is how the hours move with the first two inputs:
| Candidates phoned | 15 minutes each | 20 minutes each | 30 minutes each |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | 7.5 hours | 10 hours | 15 hours |
| 50 | 12.5 hours | 16.7 hours | 25 hours |
| 80 | 20 hours | 26.7 hours | 40 hours |
Now multiply by the roles a consultant runs in a month. Two roles at fifty candidates and twenty minutes is more than four working days of first-round calls a month, per consultant.
What the number leaves out
The arithmetic gives you the minimum. Three costs sit on top of it.
- The calls that do not connect. Voicemail, a call-back at a bad time, a candidate who asks for tomorrow. The minutes per call assume someone answers.
- What the hours were not spent on. A consultant on the phone to a shortlist is not on the phone to a client. For most desks that is the real cost, and it does not show up in the rate.
- The week the candidate waits. Fifty calls take days to get through. The candidate at the bottom of the list has often heard from someone else by then.
There is also the thing a stack of phone notes cannot give you: the same questions asked the same way of everyone, with the answers written down. Fifty calls by one consultant across a week are not fifty identical interviews, however good the consultant.
What should stay a phone call
Not all of it. The first round is mostly the same questions and mostly fact-finding: right to work, notice, salary, location, a couple of questions about the work. That is the part a written interview does well, because a candidate can answer it in their own time and the answers come back in the same shape every time.
The call that matters comes after it: the five or so people you are about to put forward. Selling them the role, reading how they talk about it, hearing what they do not say. That is judgement and relationship, and it should stay a person. Taking the first round off the phone gives you more time for that call. It does not replace it.
How to measure it on your own desk
You do not need a study. Take one week:
- For each role, count the candidates you phoned in the first round.
- For a handful of those calls, note the start and finish, notes included, and take the average.
- Work out the loaded hourly cost of the consultant who made them.
Multiply the three and you have what the first round cost you that week. The calculator on our home page does the arithmetic if you would rather not.
Bullhorn’s GRID 2026 report found 54% of APAC agencies saw KPIs improve by more than 25% from AI screening alone. That is a survey across the region. A week of your own calls will tell you more about your desk.
Alert Hire runs the first round in writing: every candidate on your shortlist gets their own interview, key checks first, and you read a ranked summary of each. The app shows the consultant time saved on every job, from your own minutes per call and hourly cost. How the interview works, or start a three-month pilot, charged at cost.
Sources
- Bullhorn, GRID 2026 Industry Trends Report, APAC edition. Checked 10 September 2026.
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