25 February 20266 min read
When teams compare hiring against outsourcing, the in-house column usually contains one number: a salary. The outsourced column contains a rate, which looks larger per hour, and the comparison ends there. Neither figure is wrong, and together they are close to useless.
Four things belong in the in-house column that are almost never in it.
1. The months the role sits open
A technical role in Western Europe commonly takes months to fill. Throughout that period the work is not happening. If it were not worth doing, you would not have opened the role, so its value is not zero while you wait, and the honest accounting puts a number against that delay.
This is usually the largest missing cost, and it is the one people find hardest to accept because it does not appear on any invoice.
2. The cost of hiring itself
- Recruitment fees, or the internal time that replaces them
- Engineering hours spent screening and interviewing, real capacity, taken from delivery
- Equipment, tooling, and desk
- Employer contributions on top of gross salary, which vary a great deal by country
None of these are controversial. They are simply left out because the salary figure is the one that is easy to reach for.
3. The risk of the wrong hire
Hiring is imperfect everywhere. When it goes wrong in a permanent role in Europe, correcting it is slow, expensive, and unpleasant for the person involved. This does not mean you should avoid hiring. It means the expected cost of a hire is higher than its nominal cost, and the comparison should reflect that.
4. What you are not doing instead
The most expensive item is usually the roadmap that did not move. A team at capacity for two quarters ships less, and what it fails to ship is rarely captured anywhere. This is genuinely hard to quantify, which is why it gets dropped, but dropping it silently sets it to zero, and zero is definitely the wrong number.
What to do with the number
Build the full comparison once, properly, for one real role you are actually considering. Not a generic model. A specific role, with your salary bands, your recruitment costs, and your best estimate of time-to-fill. It takes an afternoon, and it settles an argument that otherwise recurs every quarter on vibes.