How to budget for 3–10 hires a year without surprises

Many teams know they will be hiring in the next 12 months, but the exact timing and mix of roles is fuzzy. The result is often a budget with a couple of salary lines, a vague allowance for “recruitment”, and a lot of crossed fingers.

You do not need a complex model to do better than that. A simple, honest view of your likely Technology and Engineering hiring is enough to avoid most surprises.

Step 1: Separate genuine agency roles from everything else

Start with a list of roles you expect over the next year. Then strip out anything you would never use an external recruiter for. For example:

• Internal moves and promotions
• Graduate schemes you always run directly
• Entry roles where you know you can fill from your own network

What you are left with is the realistic pool of roles you might brief to an agency. This is the only group that matters for recruitment cost planning.

Step 2: Put realistic salary bands against each role

For each of those roles, attach a sensible salary or band. It does not need to be exact, but it does need to be honest. Using a £40k placeholder for roles that always end up at £50–55k just hides the problem.

If several roles sit in the same band, you can group them and use a blended average. For example, a cluster of roles around £45–55k might reasonably use £50k as a working figure.

Step 3: Apply a 15% fee as a baseline

Once you have a list of “real” agency roles with realistic salary bands, apply a 15% fee to each one. That gives you a baseline picture of what it would cost to fill all of them on a per-placement basis.

At this point you are not committing to 15%. You are simply understanding what the world looks like if you keep doing what you have probably done up to now.

Step 4: Look for patterns, not perfection

When you see the total, resist the urge to tweak every individual number. Instead, look for patterns:

• Are most of the roles in similar salary bands, or are they all over the place?
• Are there clear clusters in certain teams, such as Infrastructure, Cyber or Manufacturing Engineering?
• Does the overall number feel like a one-off spike, or like something that will repeat next year?

If you see repeatable patterns, you are closer to a subscription model being useful. If you see a handful of genuinely random, one-off roles, per-placement might be all you need.

Step 5: Compare against a subscription

Now compare that 15% baseline with a subscription for 1–3, 3–6 or 6–10 hires a year. The aim is not to shave every last pound. It is to see whether:

• You can move from unpredictable spikes to a steady, planned monthly cost
• You can gain a 12-month guarantee on subscription hires
• You can treat recruitment as an ongoing partnership rather than a string of one-off transactions

If the subscription sits in the same rough ballpark as your 15% baseline, but gives you those benefits, it is worth serious consideration.

Step 6: Accept that the picture will move

Budgets rarely survive contact with reality. People resign, projects get delayed and new roles appear mid-year. That does not mean there is no point planning.

A simple, transparent view of “this is what we thought would happen, and this is what actually happened” makes it much easier to adjust. It also allows you to have grown-up conversations with Finance and HR about what changed and why.

Whether you decide on 15%, a subscription or a blend of both, the main win is the thinking you do up front. Once you have done that work, the actual commercial structure is a much calmer decision.