Planning Your 2027 Hiring Budget: Questions to Ask Your Recruiting Partner
November 10, 2026
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7 min read
Owners and presidents don’t need to run recruiting day to day, but they do need hiring numbers they can trust before the year starts.
A strong 2027 hiring budget begins with the roles your company needs and the market those roles sit in, and your recruiting partner sees that market every week. Six questions turn what they know into budget lines you can defend in front of your leadership team.
Start with the roles you need
Most hiring budgets get built backward. Someone picks a number, and the roles get squeezed to fit it. A sturdier approach starts with a list of the people the business needs in 2027, by quarter, tied to what the business plans to do. A new production line, a customer program ramping up in the spring, a retirement in engineering leadership, an IT system going live in the fall: each one is a role with a date attached.
Then sort the list into replacements and growth hires. A replacement comes with a known salary and a known gap on the team. A growth hire comes with more open questions, starting with whether the role is defined well enough to recruit for yet.
Aim to have the plan approved before the holidays. Roles approved in November or early December can be posted the first week of January, when job searches pick back up after the holiday lull.
Know the benchmarks before you talk numbers
A complete recruiting budget covers outside recruiting fees, job advertising and sourcing tools, the time your own team spends interviewing, and onboarding costs for each new hire. Salaries for new roles usually sit in a separate workforce budget, but the two plans need to be built together. A few reference points help size each line.
SHRM’s 2026 benchmarking data puts the median cost-per-hire at $1,300 for nonexecutive roles and $15,000 for executive roles, up from $10,600 for executive roles in 2025. These are medians across organizations of every size and industry, so use them for comparison rather than as a quote for any single role.
Salaries are the bigger line. WTW projects average U.S. salary increase budgets of 3.4% for 2027, compared with 3.5% actual increases in 2026. That number covers raises for the people you already employ.
Time belongs in the budget, too. The same SHRM data puts the median time-to-fill at 39 calendar days for nonexecutive roles and 45 days for executive roles, measured to an accepted offer. A nonexecutive role you need in place on April 1 needs an open requisition by about February 21 at that pace, before you account for the new hire’s notice period.
Question #1: Which roles on our plan will be hardest to fill?
Hand your partner the full list and ask them to rank it by difficulty, then explain the ranking.
A useful answer gets specific about the candidate market for each role: where the qualified people work today and what has stalled similar searches in the past. A vague answer, like “they’re all tough right now,” tells you the partner hasn’t looked closely yet. Our post on why manufacturers struggle to hire for specialized engineering roles covers the most common reasons a search stalls.
The ranking changes your budget in two ways. The hardest roles need an earlier start date, and they often need a bigger share of the recruiting spend. Spotting those roles in November is far easier than discovering them in May.
Not every role on the list needs outside help. Roles your team fills easily through referrals or job posts can stay in-house, while a partner earns its fee on the hard-to-fill and specialized roles at the top of the ranking.
Question #2: What will the market pay for these roles in 2027?
The 3.4% raise projection covers your current team. New hires get priced against the market, which moves on its own schedule.
Ask your partner for compensation data on each role before you finalize the budget. A gap between your planned salary and the market rate shows up in two places. In the offer budget, an underpriced role stalls the search. Inside your company, a new hire earning more than a tenured employee in the same job raises a pay equity question worth planning for. For ways to compete on more than salary, see how small and mid-size companies can compete for engineering talent on a tight budget.
Question #3: How does your fee change when the salary does?
Recruiting fee structures respond to salary in very different ways, and that difference shows up in your budget.
A contingency fee is a percentage of first-year salary. Raise the offer during final negotiation, and the fee rises with it, so your recruiting line and your salary line move together.
DISHER Talent’s published pricing works differently: $110 to $150 per hour, plus a completion fee of $2,000 to $10,000 per placement, compared with contingency fees of 20% to 30% of salary. The hourly portion follows the work on the search rather than the size of the offer. Ask any partner on an hourly model what decides where a role lands in the completion fee range so you can budget each role accurately. DISHER’s pricing page names role complexity and market demand among the factors that shape what a search costs. For a fuller picture of how these partnerships work, see what to expect when you hire a recruiting firm.
Question #4: What should we budget per role before the search starts?
Ask for an estimated cost range and timeline for each role on your plan. A partner who has run similar searches can give you a realistic range, and that range belongs in the budget as written.
Ask, too, what you pay for a search that doesn’t end in a hire. It’s the worry at the top of many presidents’ lists, and it deserves a straight answer. Under contingency, you pay nothing until someone is hired, though you also get little visibility into the work along the way. Under an hourly model, you pay for the hours worked whether or not the search closes.
Those hours should produce something you keep: the name of every candidate contacted and the reasons candidates declined, which together give you a clear read on the market for that role.
Question #5: How will you report spend against our budget?
A hiring budget needs tracking all year long. Ask to see a sample invoice next to a sample status report so your finance team can compare spend against the estimate for each search. The two together tell you whether you’ll spot a search running over its range in month two or month six. DISHER Talent clients join weekly calibration meetings and get reporting dashboards, so they always know who’s being sourced and how each search is moving.
Question #6: What happens to the budget when priorities change?
Plans change. A customer program slips a quarter, or a role you budgeted for turns out to need a different skill set.
Ask what it costs to pause a search or swap one role for another, and whether unused budget for one role can move to another. Minimum commitments and notice periods matter here, too. The flexibility to redirect spend mid-year is worth as much as the starting number.
DISHER Talent has no minimum commitment, and clients can scale a search up, down, or pause it anytime.
When a critical seat can’t wait for the search to finish, budget for interim coverage. A contract engineer or interim specialist can carry the work while the search runs, which protects project schedules and customer commitments. DISHER can contract one of its own engineers for exactly that, so ask any partner whether they offer interim coverage and how it’s priced.
Build your 2027 plan with us
DISHER Talent works alongside owners and presidents to turn a list of open roles into a hiring plan with real numbers behind it. Through our talent consulting work, we help you decide who to hire first and what each search should cost, and we hire for culture as much as skill set.
Book a consult with a DISHER Talent specialist and bring your 2027 hiring list.
