How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Developer in Quebec? In-House vs Agency

You need to hire a developer and you are weighing two options: run the search with your internal team or mandate a recruitment agency. The question sounds simple, but the answer is anything but. An agency invoice is visible, written in black and white in a contract. The cost of internal recruiting hides across dozens of budget lines: job board subscriptions, HR hours, manager interviews and, above all, every week the seat stays empty. In this article, we break down the real cost of both approaches, with sourced numbers, to help you make an informed decision.

The baseline: what the data says

Let's start with the big averages. According to SHRM's (Society for Human Resource Management) benchmarking report, the average cost per hire exceeds 4,100 USD across all industries (source: SHRM). And that figure climbs quickly for specialized roles, where processes are longer and more demanding.

But beware: these averages include every type of role, from clerk to director. In tech, timelines and costs explode. According to the Time-to-Hire Factbook by Josh Bersin and AMS, the average hiring timeline reaches 44 days across all functions (source: Josh Bersin), and LinkedIn data shows engineering roles are the slowest to fill, with a median time to hire of 49 days (source: HR Dive). In Canada, the average time to fill a position reached 52 days in 2025 (source: Jobs.ca). Every one of those days has a price, as we will see below.

Internal recruiting: the itemized bill

Internal recruiting is never free. Here are the expense lines you should add up for an intermediate developer in Montreal (reference salary: 100,000 CAD).

• Job postings and visibility: LinkedIn promoted posts run on an auction model with a minimum budget of 7 to 10 USD per day and an average cost of about 2.83 USD per applicant in the US (source: Forbes Advisor), and Indeed also enforces a minimum budget per sponsored posting. Over a 50-day active campaign for a tech role, expect 500 to 1,500 CAD, with no guarantee of quality.
• HR time: writing the job description, screening applications (often several hundred for a developer role), phone screens, interview coordination. At a loaded rate of 35 to 45 CAD per hour, 40 to 60 hours of HR work represents 1,500 to 2,700 CAD.
• Tools: ATS, LinkedIn Recruiter license (several thousand dollars per year), technical assessments. Even prorated over a single hire, several hundred dollars.
• Manager time: the most underestimated line item, and it deserves its own section.

Your managers' time: the invisible cost

According to Ashby's Talent Trends report, engineering hires require an average of 24.7 hours of interviews per hire, spread across nearly 18 interviews, almost double what non-technical roles require (source: Ashby). Those hours are delivered by your senior developers, your team leads and your CTO, in other words the people with the highest real hourly rate in your organization.

Let's do the math: 25 hours of interviews involving profiles at 80 to 120 CAD per hour (loaded salary) represents 2,000 to 3,000 CAD per hire, in interview time alone. Add preparation, debriefs and decision committees, and you easily double that amount. And this calculation assumes the process succeeds on the first attempt: if your finalist declines the offer or accepts a counter-offer, a good share of that investment has to be spent again.

The cost of vacancy: the meter keeps running

While you recruit, the seat stays empty. A missing developer means features that do not ship, projects that slip and a team that compensates by burning out. Estimates put the cost of a vacant technical role at around 500 USD per day in lost productivity, between delayed projects and overload on the remaining team (source: Tatvic), and analyses focused on unrealized revenue reach even higher amounts.

Apply that figure to the average Canadian timeline of 52 days and you get more than 26,000 CAD of lost value per hire, before you have paid a single recruiting dollar. This is exactly the cost that speed of execution compresses. And we are only talking about a role filled correctly: when a hire fails, the numbers explode, as we documented in our article on the cost of a bad tech hire in Quebec.

How much does an agency cost, and what exactly are you paying for?

Permanent recruitment agencies typically charge success-based contingency fees between 15% and 25% of first-year salary, with a common benchmark at 20% (source: Leonar). For a developer at 100,000 CAD, the invoice lands between 15,000 and 25,000 CAD, payable only if the hire happens.

At VALO, our fee is fixed and transparent: 18% of annual salary, with a 3-month replacement guarantee and the first qualified candidates presented in under 2 weeks. What you are buying is not just a resume: it is a pool of pre-qualified candidates, technical and salary screening (grounded in market data you can consult in our tech salary guide), counter-offer management and a radical reduction of your cost of vacancy. We detailed this profitability calculation in our article on the ROI of outsourcing tech recruitment.

The numbers side by side: internal vs agency for a 100,000 CAD developer

Let's put everything side by side for an intermediate developer in Montreal.

• Internal recruiting: postings and tools (1,000 to 2,500 CAD) + HR time (1,500 to 2,700 CAD) + manager time (2,000 to 6,000 CAD) + cost of vacancy over 50 or more days (26,000 CAD and often more) = 30,000 to 40,000 CAD in total real cost.
• Agency (VALO at 18%): 18,000 CAD in fees + reduced manager time (interviews only with pre-qualified finalists) + compressed cost of vacancy thanks to first candidates in under 2 weeks = often 20,000 to 28,000 CAD in total real cost.

The conclusion may surprise you: at full cost, an agency is frequently cheaper than internal recruiting for tech roles, precisely because the cost of vacancy and manager time weigh more than the fees. That does not mean internal recruiting never makes sense: if you hire ten developers per year, a dedicated recruiting team is justified. But for two to five tech hires per year, the numbers clearly favour outsourcing. Just make sure your salary is aligned with the market, a point we document every year in our analysis of Montreal tech salaries in 2026.

Conclusion: compare full costs, not invoices

The real comparison is not 18,000 CAD in fees versus zero dollars: it is a visible, guaranteed cost versus a set of hidden costs (HR time, manager time, postings, extended vacancy) that often exceed 30,000 CAD without anyone ever consolidating them into a single spreadsheet. Before your next hire, run the full calculation.

Want a precise estimate for your context? Discover our offer for employers: 18% fee, 3-month guarantee, first qualified candidates in under 2 weeks. We will be happy to quantify the real cost of your next hire with you.