The case for objective hiring, in your numbers.

Screening time, the headline assumption

The "hours to screen 100 candidates" input replaces the per-minute resume math you usually see in vendor calculators. It is a number HR leaders intuitively know and CFOs accept. Our default of 48 hours (six working days, or roughly 1.5 weeks of full-time recruiter focus) reflects a realistic blended workflow on a 100-applicant funnel: a recruiter spends roughly 1.5 to 2 minutes per CV across all 100 applicants (around 3 hours total), then runs 30 to 45 minute phone calls, including prep, scheduling, and notes overhead, for the 20 to 30 percent of candidates who pass the CV gate (a further 10 to 15 hours). Add hiring-manager calibration time, debrief, and follow-up. The total lands between 40 and 60 hours per 100 candidates for most mid-market organizations. Adjust upward for senior or specialist roles where each CV warrants longer review, downward for high-volume blue-collar or BPO funnels.

Recruiter cost per hour is derived automatically: annual recruiter cost ÷ (20 working days × 12 months × 8 hours). So a €50,000 recruiter costs roughly €26 per hour.

Why some inputs are locked

The five Bryq impact assumptions (60% screening reduction, 35% hiring managers / leaders interview load reduction, 40% bad-hire reduction, 22% retention uplift, 15% internal mobility) are deliberately fixed. They come from Bryq customer data and published meta-analyses, not from negotiation. The one Bryq-side number you control is the cost of an external recruitment cycle, which has two pieces: the recruiter hours your team puts in (auto-calculated from your inputs above) plus an estimate of external fees per round. Most mid-market organizations spend between €500 and €3,000 in direct external fees per cycle. Agency placements run much higher.

The science behind quality of hire

The 40 percent bad-hire reduction is not a marketing number; it reflects more than a century of industrial-organizational psychology research on what predicts job performance. The landmark meta-analysis by Schmidt and Hunter (1998), updated by Schmidt, Oh, and Shaffer (2016), synthesized 85 years of personnel selection studies. Its central finding: general mental ability (cognitive ability) is the single strongest construct-based predictor of job performance, with an operational validity of r ≈ 0.51 across all roles. Validity rises with job complexity. The more recent Sackett et al. (2022) re-analysis offered a course correction on individual coefficients, but the practical conclusion has not moved: no single predictor outperforms a well-designed composite.

The strongest composites pair cognitive ability with a structured measure of personality. Schmidt and Hunter reported that cognitive ability combined with an integrity or conscientiousness measure produced composite validities above 0.60, materially higher than either method alone. The mechanism is straightforward: cognitive ability predicts whether someone can do the job; personality predicts whether they will do it consistently, fit the team, and stay. Bryq's assessment is built on exactly this composite: cognitive ability plus a 16PF-based personality assessment, the same psychometric framework used in clinical and organizational research for six decades.

Skills testing closes the third gap. Cognitive ability and personality predict potential and behaviour, but they do not verify whether a candidate has the specific hard skills the role requires today. For roles where AI proficiency, coding, language fluency, or domain knowledge is a baseline expectation, Bryq pairs the psychometric core with role-specific skills assessments, including Bryq's AI Proficiency Assessment. The result is the full picture: can think + will perform + can do the work. This is the composite that produces the 40 percent bad-hire reduction at the heart of pillar two.

The five value pillars

Pillar 1, recruiter time saved. (annual hires × candidates per hire) × (hours to screen 100 ÷ 100) × screening reduction × recruiter hourly rate. Bryq replaces the bottom of the funnel with an automated, ranked shortlist.

Pillar 2, hiring managers / leaders time saved. annual hires × candidates interviewed per hire × minutes per round × rounds × panel size × interview reduction × manager hourly rate ÷ 60. This is the saving most calculators miss. A better shortlist means fewer finalists, and the assessment data already answers "fit" questions, allowing shorter or fewer interview rounds. The interview-to-hire ratio across mid-market organizations averages 4.8:1 (Thomas.co); enterprise teams conduct 65 to 75 interviews per hire (RecruitBPM, 2026). Across the organization, 66 percent of total hiring time is spent on interviews (industry benchmark), and a hiring manager or leader's hour costs the company 1.5 to 3 times more than a recruiter's. This pillar typically rivals or exceeds Pillar 1 in size.

Pillar 3, bad hires avoided. annual hires × current bad-hire rate × bad-hire reduction × (bad-hire cost % × average salary). The cost-of-bad-hire percentage is fully under your control. SHRM and the US Department of Labor use 30 percent as a floor, which is our default.

Pillar 4, retention improvement. annual hires × current attrition × retention uplift × (50% of salary as replacement cost). The 50 percent multiplier sits above the SHRM floor and below most academic estimates. It is hard-coded rather than exposed as an input, to avoid double-counting against the bad-hire pillar.

Pillar 5, internal mobility. annual hires × internal-fill rate × cost of an external recruitment cycle avoided. Each internal fill replaces a complete external cycle: the recruiter time on a 100-CV round plus external fees. This is where most skills-test competitors have no answer.

The headline ROI

ROI = (total annual value − Bryq subscription) ÷ Bryq subscription. Defaults are deliberately conservative against published meta-analyses and Bryq customer data. For bad-hire rate specifically, our 15 percent default sits well below the 20 to 30 percent range published by CareerBuilder (2017) and the 46 percent new-hire failure rate within 18 months reported by Leadership IQ. The intent is a number that survives finance-committee scrutiny, not a headline figure designed to be discounted.