What it actually costs to hire one person in Bangladesh

Nobody can tell you what a hire costs in Bangladesh, and you should be suspicious of anyone who gives you one number. What we can do is name every line item, price the ones that have a published price, and show you which one only you can fill in — because that is almost always the biggest.

Most "cost per hire" figures you will read are from American surveys of American companies, converted badly. They are not useless, but they are not your number. Here is how to build yours.

The four line items

Every hire costs some combination of four things. Two have published prices. One we measured ourselves. One is yours alone.

1. Advertising: published, and cheaper than people expect

BDJobs publishes its employer rates. As of September 2026, a single job posting runs:

Those are list prices from BDJobs' own service packages page, for a 30-day listing, and bulk subscriptions discount them. Check the page rather than trusting this paragraph in six months — it is the kind of number that moves.

For most roles this is the smallest item on the list, which surprises people who think of advertising as "the cost of hiring".

2. Processing: what we measured

This is our own data, from our own billing ledger, and it is the part we can speak to precisely. Between 10 and 20 September 2026 we logged the cost of every AI call the product made:

At roughly Tk 142 to the dollar, scoring a CV costs about four paisa. Scoring five hundred of them costs about Tk 200 — less than a fifteenth of the cheapest job posting.

Two honest caveats. These are small samples, especially the interview figure at fourteen runs. And that interview number is the scoring half only: the live conversation itself is billed separately and we do not yet log it per session, so we are not going to quote you a total for an interview. When we can, we will.

3. Your time: the item that actually decides the answer

We cannot price this for you, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. There is no published figure for what an hour of a Bangladeshi recruiter's attention is worth, and the salary aggregators that come up in search are restating national averages at second hand — not what your HR manager costs you per hour.

So price it yourself. It takes one line:

The numbers in that table are an illustration, not a benchmark. Put your own in. Then the only remaining question is how many hours a role takes, and that is where volume bites.

A worked example, at three volumes

One role, advertised once on a Basic Listing at Tk 3,098, with the hourly figure above. Assume a careful reader manages about 20 CVs an hour — that is three minutes each, which is generous if you are reading properly and impossible to sustain for long.

Read the shape rather than the figures. At 50 applicants the posting dominates. At 500 the posting is a quarter of the cost and your team has lost three full working days to reading, before a single conversation has happened. That is the crossover that matters, and it is the reason high-volume roles feel different to hire for — not because the advertising got more expensive.

4. Getting it wrong: why we are not giving you a number

You will find confident figures for "the cost of a bad hire" — often quoted as some multiple of salary. We are not going to repeat them. The studies behind them are mostly from other countries, other labour laws and other notice periods, and the multiplier changes completely depending on whether you count lost output, the manager's time, the second recruitment round, or team morale.

What is defensible without a citation: a replacement costs you the whole of items 1 to 3 again, plus whatever the empty seat was producing. If a role took Tk 11,623 and three days to fill, getting it wrong costs at least that much twice.

What software actually removes, and what it does not

• It removes the reading hours, not the deciding hours. Ranking 500 CVs takes minutes and costs a few hundred taka. Deciding who to talk to still takes a person.
• It does not remove the interviews. It changes who you spend them on.
• It does not remove the posting cost. Nothing does.
• It does not make a bad job description work. A vague posting produces vague applicants, and then you have paid to read them.

If you take one thing: the cost of hiring in Bangladesh is not a market rate you can look up. It is mostly your own team's hours, and the number of hours is set by how many people apply and how carefully you have described the job. Both of those are things you control.

Sources

• Job posting prices: BDJobs service packages, checked 21 September 2026.
• Processing costs: our own API billing ledger, 10–20 September 2026, 84 logged runs across the three steps shown.
• Hourly rate and reading speed: illustrations, labelled as such. Replace them with yours.