The Hidden Burn Multiple of Hiring Inefficiency

Founders obsess over CAC and LTV.

They watch burn multiple like hawks.

They build dashboards to model every dollar of runway.

But most miss the silent metric that’s eating growth from the inside:

CHC — Cost of Hiring Cycles.

What Is CHC?

CHC is the hidden tax of slow, inefficient hiring.

It’s the lost ARR, wasted recruiter hours, duplicated CVs, and agency fees that stack every time you reset a hiring cycle.

Think of it like churn — only it’s happening in your hiring engine, not your customer base.

Every time a role sits open, CHC ticks upward:

Delayed revenue: A £600k AE quota slipping 3 weeks = £34.5k ARR lost.
Churn exposure: A £2m renewal book unmanaged for 6 weeks = £230k at risk.
Duplicated effort: Agencies send the same CVs your internal team already sourced — wasting time + fees.
Reset cycles: When an agency hire churns in 6 months, you pay the CHC all over again.

Multiply that across multiple GTM roles and quarters, and CHC quietly becomes one of your biggest burn drivers.

Agencies:
- Each cycle costs £20–30k.
- Every delay adds weeks of lost revenue.
- High churn risk = CHC compounding.
RPO / Embedded Recruiters:
- Fixed retainers, limited bandwidth.
- When priorities shift, cycles stall.
- CHC grows quietly as contracts burn runway.
Internal Only:
- Invaluable, but bandwidth + tool limitations mean slow pipelines.
- Every delay = incremental CHC cost.

These models weren’t designed to reduce CHC.They were designed to bill you per cycle.

Founders accept CAC drops as brand compounds.They expect gross margin to improve with scale.

But when it comes to hiring? Most accept CHC compounding up.

It doesn’t have to.With infrastructure, CHC falls as you grow.

TalentLayerOMX™ flips the curve:

Rolling shortlists: Candidates delivered in 2–5 days, cutting weeks of delay (lost ARR avoided).
Signal-based sourcing: Always-on pipelines tied to market triggers.
Switchable job slots: Priorities shift? Reallocate instantly, no reset cycles.
Live dashboards: Full visibility into funnel conversion = no wasted recruiter hours.
Flat monthly model: No per-hire invoices stacking on CHC.

Result: cost-per-hire drops below £1,500 at scale.CHC compounds down, not up.

Case Study — SaaS Series A Expansion

Case Study — Fintech Scale-Up

HR lead juggling multiple agencies, pipelines duplicating.
CHC impact: recruiter time wasted + churn risk rising.
OMX: consolidated into one infrastructure. 6 hires in 9 weeks. Total spend under £9k.

Case Study — Health-tech Post-Acquisition

Internal recruiters tied up in duplicate CVs across merged systems.
CHC impact: hundreds of wasted recruiter hours + extended vacancies.
OMX: zero duplicates, rolling shortlists. Internal recruiters refocused on experience.

💡 Lesson: OMX doesn’t just reduce cost-per-hire. It slashes the hidden burn multiple of CHC.