Every résumé looks strong now. See what it costs your interviewers_
Candidates use AI to polish every application, so your interviewers spend hours on people who look right on paper and cannot do the job. Use this interview cost calculator to see what that costs for engineering and business roles, and how much interview time you get back when every candidate completes a Codility skills assessment before the interview.
Your interviewers spend about 2,600 hours and $312,000 a year interviewing.See your results
Engineering roles
hires
candidates
PlaceholderBenchmark: about 35 interviews per technical hire, roughly 18 candidates over 2 rounds. Gem, 2026.
hours
PlaceholderBenchmark: about 26 interviewer hours per technical hire. Gem, 2026.
$per hour
PlaceholderUS median pay for computer and information systems managers, $175,140 in May 2025, plus benefits. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Use your own salary plus overhead, divided by 2,080 working hours.
Business roles
hires
candidates
PlaceholderBenchmark: about 21 interviews per sales hire, roughly 11 candidates over 2 rounds. Gem, 2025.
hours
PlaceholderEstimate: 21 interviews of about 37 minutes each, one interviewer per interview. Gem, 2025, and Metaview, 2026.
$per hour
PlaceholderExample figure. Use salary plus overhead, divided by 2,080 working hours.
Engineering roles
Your engineers spend about
2,600hours a year interviewing
$312,000 of interviewer time a year. That is 1.3 full working years.
17 of every 18 candidates you interview do not get the job.
If every candidate showed their work before the interview
017
You get back1,010hours a year
$121,300 of interviewer time a year, or 0.5 full working years.
You set this number. Every figure here is your own arithmetic.
Business roles: Sales
Your hiring managers spend about
1,300hours a year interviewing
$97,500 of interviewer time a year. That is 0.6 full working years.
10 of every 11 candidates you interview do not get the job.
If every candidate showed their work before the interview
010
You get back350hours a year
$26,600 of interviewer time a year, or 0.2 full working years.
You set this number. Every figure here is your own arithmetic.
It is built from your numbers and updates as you change them. It rewrites itself for the roles you hire, because engineering hiring and business hiring answer to different approvers. Add your details, then download it or copy it straight into an email.
Make it yours
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Business case: assessing candidates before the interview
October 2026 · Engineering roles
Engineering roles
The problem
You plan 100 engineering hires in the next 12 months. Your engineers will spend about 2,600 hours interviewing, $312,000 of their time. 17 of every 18 candidates you interview do not get the job.
What changes
Every candidate completes a work simulation in Codility Screen before the interview, in a real coding environment where they can use Claude Code and Codex. AI assistance is enabled or disabled per task, and AI usage is included with no API keys to set up. Your engineers interview the candidates whose work holds up.
If that removes 7 candidates per hire from your interview list, your team gets back about 1,010 hours and $121,300 of interviewer time a year.
What engineering leaders and finance will ask
Will our engineers trust the results? Every work simulation is built from a library of 1,300+ tasks validated by the Codility assessment science team.
How is AI use handled? AI assistance is enabled or disabled per task, and every interaction is saved as reviewable AI activity.
How is integrity handled? Layered integrity signals, including ID verification, behavioral monitoring and risk scoring, with the evidence kept for human review.
How do candidates feel about it? 9 in 10 candidates say the assessment content is fair, from 48,000+ candidate responses, October 2025 to April 2026.
Business roles: Sales
The problem
You plan 100 hires in sales in the next 12 months. Your hiring managers will spend about 1,300 hours interviewing, $97,500 of their time. 10 of every 11 candidates you interview do not get the job.
What changes
Every candidate completes a Codility AI skills assessment before the interview: a real deliverable for the role, produced with an AI assistant and scored against a documented method. Your hiring managers interview the candidates whose work holds up.
If that removes 3 candidates per hire from your interview list, your team gets back about 350 hours and $26,600 of interviewer time a year.
What talent, legal and your AI ethics committee will ask
What exactly is measured? Getting real work done with AI: giving context, directing the assistant, judging its output and delivering the result.
Who scores it? The deliverable is scored deterministically against a documented method, and the full AI transcript stays reviewable.
Is this a new system? It runs on the same platform, scoring, reporting, integrations and compliance posture as Codility’s engineering assessments, refined over almost two decades.
Does it fit our process? Results flow into your applicant tracking system through Codility’s integrations.
Proposed next step
Run Codility on one open role this quarter. Compare interviewer hours and the share of interviewed candidates who get an offer against the figures above.
Method and sources
Figures combine your inputs with public benchmarks from Gem’s 2026 and 2025 Recruiting Benchmarks, Ashby Talent Trends and Metaview. Time back uses your average interviewer time per candidate. Hours are rounded to the nearest 10 and dollars to the nearest $100.
Hiring teams now interview more people for every hire
The public benchmarks behind the defaults in the calculator.
3x
as many applications per hire as in 2021. Ashby Talent Trends, 2021 to 2024
52%
more candidates interviewed per technical hire than in 2021. Business roles are up 36%. Ashby Talent Trends, 2021 to 2026
26 hours
of interviewer time for every technical hire. Gem, 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks
How the numbers work
Every figure in the calculator is arithmetic on your inputs, and every default comes from a published benchmark. Here is the whole method.
The arithmetic
Interview time a year = hires × interviewer hours per hire.
Interviewer cost = interview time × the hourly cost of your interviewers.
Full working years = interview time ÷ 2,080 hours.
Average interviewer hours per candidate = interviewer hours per hire ÷ candidates interviewed per hire.
Time back = hires × candidates you would no longer interview × average interviewer hours per candidate. Finalists take the most time, so set your scenario with your own drop-off in mind.
Hours are rounded to the nearest 10 and dollars to the nearest $100.
Ashby Talent Trends, Recruiter Productivity. 109 million applications from January 2021 to March 2026. Supplies the growth in applications and candidates interviewed per hire since 2021, and candidates interviewed and interviewer hours per hire for product management and customer support.
Metaview, Time to hire by role. Recorded interview length by role family, December 2020 to June 2026. Supplies the average length of a sales interview.
See who can do the job before the interview
Tell us one role you are hiring for. We will show you a sample assessment and the report your interviewers would see.
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