How much does it cost to hire an employee in Nigeria?

Ask a founder what a hire costs and they will name the job-board fee. It is the one number with an invoice attached, so it is the one that feels like the cost. It is also, for most roles, the smallest line on the list.

There are three ways to get applicants and they price very differently. A paid post on a Nigerian job board such as Jobberman or MyJobMag is a fixed fee per role, small relative to any salary, and it usually produces volume rather than precision. An agency is the expensive end: contingency recruiters are commonly paid a percentage of the hire's first-year salary, invoiced when the person starts, with the percentage varying by seniority and difficulty. Referrals from your own team are close to free in cash, often the highest quality per applicant, and strictly limited by how many people your team knows.

The honest way to read these is that sourcing spend buys you attention, not a hire. A paid post gets your role in front of people. Everything that turns those people into a decision is unpaid labour by someone on your team, and that is where the money actually goes.

You do not need a study for this. You need a calculator and honesty about how long you actually spend on a CV.

Say you post an operations role in Lagos and get two hundred applications, which is unremarkable for a decent job board. A genuine first pass, opening the CV, reading the last two roles, checking whether the experience is real, takes about three minutes. Two hundred applications at three minutes each is six hundred minutes, or ten hours. That is more than a full working day of a manager doing nothing else.

Then the pass survivors get a proper read. If thirty people make it, and a serious read plus a note takes ten minutes, that is another five hours. You are at fifteen hours before a single interview, and that assumes nobody gets distracted, no CV needs a second look, and you never lose your place and start again.

Now price the hour. Whatever your operations manager or founder is worth per hour, multiply by fifteen. For most companies that number quietly exceeds the job-board fee several times over, and it never appears in a budget because nobody invoices you for your own Tuesday.

This is the line worth compressing, because it is pure overhead. Tezera reads and scores every application against the outcomes you defined before the role went live, so the first pass is done when you open the pipeline and your fifteen hours go to the ten people worth a conversation. The limitation is that it only helps once you have applicants and once you have defined what the role must achieve. It does not source candidates and it will not score anyone against a role with no defined outcomes.

An interview looks like a one-hour cost and is usually a three-hour one. There is scheduling, which for a five-person company means someone chasing availability over WhatsApp. There is the conversation. There is the write-up, which either happens badly in five minutes or properly in twenty. And there is the debrief, where two or three people argue from memory about a candidate none of them took structured notes on.

Multiply that by however many people sit in. A panel of three for a one-hour interview is three hours of company time, not one. Run eight candidates through two rounds each and the interview stage alone can consume a working week spread across your most expensive people.

There are two ways this cost gets worse. The first is unstructured interviewing: without an agreed set of questions and criteria, every conversation is a fresh improvisation and the debrief has nothing to compare. The second is interviewing too many people because the screening was weak, which is the screening cost arriving again in a more expensive form.

Beyond the search, employing someone in Nigeria carries recurring costs that sit on top of the salary you agreed. The rates and thresholds change, so treat this as a list of things to budget for and confirm the current figures with your accountant rather than a page on the internet.

• Pension: employers contribute to each employee's retirement savings account under the contributory pension scheme, as a percentage of a defined portion of pay, on top of the employee's own contribution.
• National Housing Fund and NSITF: statutory deductions and employer contributions that apply depending on your size and sector.
• PAYE administration: the tax itself comes out of the employee's pay, but the filing, remittance and record-keeping cost you time or an accountant's fee every month.
• HMO and benefits where you offer them: health cover is not universally required of small employers but is close to expected for professional roles in Lagos, and it is an annual per-head cost.
• Equipment and access: a laptop, a phone line, software seats and whatever tools the role needs, usually paid before the person produces anything.
• Onboarding time: the first weeks are someone else's hours as much as the new hire's, and a manager losing five hours a week for a month is a real cost that never gets written down.

Everything above is the cost of hiring. This is the cost of hiring wrong, and it is the reason the cheap search is often the expensive one.

Work it through without exaggeration. Someone starts, and it takes two months before anyone admits the doubt out loud. It takes another two months of coaching, warnings and hope before a decision is made. That is four months of salary for output well below what the role needed, plus the manager time spent managing the problem instead of the work. Add whatever exit costs apply, notice or severance under your contract, and the handover of whatever they were holding.

Then you run the search again. The job-board fee again, the fifteen hours of screening again, the interview week again, the onboarding again. And the role has now been effectively vacant for six months, which is the part nobody prices: the customers not called, the reports not built, the team carrying the gap and quietly resenting it.

You do not need a percentage from a study to see the shape of this. A bad hire costs multiples of what any part of the search cost. Which means spending an extra week getting the brief right, asking every candidate the same questions, and testing the actual work before the offer is almost always cheaper than the alternative, even when it feels slower in the moment.

Do this once, on paper, for the next role you open. It takes fifteen minutes and it changes how you spend on hiring.

1. Write down the salary you intend to offer, monthly and annual. Every other number will be a fraction of this one.
2. Add your sourcing spend: the job-board posts you will pay for, plus an agency fee if you are using one, calculated as its percentage of that annual salary.
3. Estimate applications, then multiply by three minutes for the first pass and ten minutes for the shortlist read. Convert to hours and multiply by what the person doing the reading is worth per hour.
4. Count interview hours honestly: candidates times rounds times attendees, plus half an hour per interview for notes and debrief. Price those hours the same way.
5. Add the first-year employer costs on top of salary: pension, statutory contributions, HMO if you offer it, equipment, and a realistic allowance for onboarding time from whoever manages them.
6. Finally, write the risk line: four months of that salary plus a repeat of steps two to four. That is what one wrong decision costs, and it tells you how much rigour the process is worth.

The same question, phrased the other ways people ask it. Every one of them lands on this page.

• What is the true cost of hiring in Nigeria?
• How much should a small business budget for a hire?
• What does a bad hire cost?
• What are the hidden costs of recruitment in Nigeria?

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Everything else we have written like this sits on the answers index.