The Real Cost of Manual CV Screening for UK Recruitment Agencies

Every recruiter knows manual CV screening takes time. But when you actually calculate what that time costs your agency, the numbers are eye-opening. Let's work through the real cost of manual screening.

The Direct Time Cost

Research shows recruiters spend an average of 23 hours screening CVs per role. That's not including phone screens, interviews, or client communication. Just the initial CV review.

Let's say your average recruiter earns £30,000 per year. That works out to roughly £15.50 per hour (including employer costs like NI and pension contributions).

23 hours × £15.50 = £356.50 per role in direct labour costs.

If your agency fills 20 roles per month, that's £7,130 per month (£85,560 per year) spent just on reading CVs. And that's with just one recruiter. Scale that across a team of five recruiters and you're looking at over £400,000 annually.

The Opportunity Cost: What Else Could They Be Doing?

But direct labour cost isn't the full picture. The bigger question is: what else could your recruiters be doing with those 23 hours?

Think about the high-value activities they could focus on instead:

• Building relationships with top candidates
• Developing client relationships and winning new business
• Conducting thorough interviews with promising candidates
• Improving their market knowledge and sector expertise
• Actually filling more roles (and earning more placements)

Let's be conservative and say that just 10% of that screening time could be redirected to activities that win new business or improve placement rates. On a £30k salary, that's £8,500 worth of time per recruiter per year that could drive revenue rather than just process CVs.

The Quality Cost: Missing Great Candidates

Here's the cost that's hardest to quantify but potentially the most expensive: the great candidates you miss because they're buried in your pile of CVs.

After reading 40-50 CVs, human judgment deteriorates. It's not a personal failing; it's psychology. Decision fatigue is real. That means candidate #73 is less likely to get a fair assessment than candidate #8, regardless of their actual quality.

And if you're time-pressured (which you always are), you might stop at the first 30 decent CVs and never even look at candidates 31-100. One of those could have been the perfect placement.

What's that worth? Well, if you miss just one exceptional candidate per quarter who would have been a great placement, and your average placement fee is £6,000, that's £24,000 in potential lost revenue annually.

Simple Cost Calculator

Want to calculate your own costs? Here's a simple framework:

For most small-to-medium agencies, the total real cost (direct + opportunity + quality) of manual CV screening ranges from £100,000 to £500,000 annually. That's a significant chunk of operating budget.

When Manual Screening Still Makes Sense

Let's be balanced here. Manual screening isn't always the enemy. For very specialised roles where you only get 10-15 applications from a known talent pool, manual screening is probably fine. The relationship context and nuanced understanding you bring is valuable.

Similarly, for roles where the candidate pool is so niche that you personally know most of the qualified people in the market, automation adds little value.

But for high-volume roles, mid-level positions attracting 80+ applications, or situations where you're screening the same types of roles repeatedly? That's where the costs stack up fast, and where automation delivers clear ROI.

The Bottom Line

Manual CV screening isn't free. It costs your agency in direct labour, lost opportunities, and potentially missed placements. And unlike rent or software subscriptions, it's a cost that scales linearly with volume. The more successful you are, the more it costs.

The question isn't whether manual screening has costs. It's whether those costs are justified by the value it delivers, or whether there's a better way to allocate your team's time.