New Hire ROI Calculator
When will your new hire pay for itself?
→ Find out in under 2 minutes.
A new hire is an investment: acquisition cost and a full salary are committed from day one, while productivity arrives over months of ramp-up. Map that ramp, forecast the point where the hire's contribution covers the investment — and the return that compounds after it. Every forecast comes three ways — a lower, expected and best case — and carries an Ascent Score: one 0–10 reading of how efficiently the hire converts invested capital into return.
How it works Read the 3 steps
Describe the role. Pick the function, role and seniority. The archetype, value engine and benchmarks are derived from that profile automatically.
Enter the numbers. Salary and package, employee acquisition cost and any sales target. Locked fields carry role-standard assumptions you can trust.
Read the forecast. Break-even, ROI and cash exposure across a lower, expected and best case — with an Ascent Score for the efficiency of the hire.
No problem — the forecast runs on the universal role profile. Industry specialisms change which roles a company hires, not how their value is measured.
Role, Pay and Onboarding ramp
Dive deeper → Acquisition cost $20,000
Check out our New Hire Cost Calculator tool to get a granular overview of new employee acquisition costs — from cost of hours spent interviewing to unrealised revenue opportunity costs.
Dive deeper → Sales revenue target
No sales target: this role's value is forecast from its output, not a quota.
These suggestions are auto-generated based on your inputs.
Speak to Talent Ascent to get tailored support on how to improve the efficiency of your hiring.
Lower and Best show one standard deviation below and above expected performance for this role's complexity. The range is wider for complex and quota-carrying roles, and it is asymmetric on purpose: underperformance stretches break-even further than overperformance shortens it. If the lower case shows "not within 36 months", that is the honest answer, not an error.
Add your name and business email to download the full forecast — every assumption with its source, the lower/expected/best cases, and the complete Ascent Score breakdown. We'll only use them to share relevant insights.
Precise breakdown of units and assumptions
| Cash break-even T* | — |
| Rate break-even | — |
| Time-to-productivity (90%) | — |
| Max cash exposure | — |
| ROI at 12 months | — |
| ROI at 24 months | — |
| ROI at 36 months | — |
| Direct value / month at full ramp | — |
| Protected value / month at full ramp | — |
| Enabled revenue / month | — |
| Acquisition cost | — |
| Equity cost over horizon | — |
| Total value over horizon | — |
| Total cost over horizon | — |
Estimate only. Currency is a unit of account — switching it relabels the figures rather than converting them at an exchange rate. Gross margin follows your business-model selection: 75% for software (blended industry median) or 55% for AI-native. Onboarding periods scale with seniority (×1.0–×1.75). Manager and buddy time is excluded from this free tool; the paid New Hire Cost Report prices it against your own figures.
New Hire ROI Report - $2,000
- 36-month cost and contribution
- Peak exposure month
- Break-even month
- ROI at years 1, 2 and 3
- Runway impact
- 45-minute delivery call
Order your New Hire ROI Report
A full written forecast for your role, built on your numbers and reviewed by us — including the calibrated Ascent Score, all three cases, and every assumption stated and sourced.
Introductory Offer — at least 15% off until 30th September 2026 · delivered within 7 business days of data upload
Running this forecast for a full team or department?
Discovery calls are exploratory and free of charge.
Each role's contribution is quantified with the established method for its function — the same standards used in corporate finance, workforce economics and risk management — so every forecast rests on published evidence and clearly stated assumptions.
01 Revenue roles Corporate finance
Sales, marketing and customer-success roles are valued on the revenue they close, source or protect: target × expected attainment × gross margin, with timing shifted by the sales cycle. Retention roles are measured through net revenue retention — the churn they prevent and the expansion they drive.
02 Productivity & delivery roles Workforce economics
Utility analysis — the workforce-economics method developed by Brogden, Cronbach & Gleser and validated by Schmidt & Hunter — finds that a fully-productive professional’s output is worth roughly twice their fully-loaded cost. Engineering, product and operations roles are valued on that evidence base, calibrated per role.
03 Cost & risk roles Security & risk economics
Finance, procurement, legal and security functions are valued the way those professions already report their impact: cost reduced, cost avoided, and expected loss prevented — the single-loss value of an incident × the change in its likelihood, the standard used in security economics and corporate risk accounting.
04 Forecast uncertainty Peer-reviewed research
Output variability is measured, not guessed. Each role carries a volatility level anchored in peer-reviewed research on how individual performance disperses by job complexity, and every result is recalculated at one standard deviation below and above the expected case. Complex and quota-carrying roles show wider, honestly asymmetric ranges.
05 The Ascent Score Talent Ascent methodology
Every forecast carries an Ascent Score — a 0–10 reading of how efficiently the capital invested in this hire converts into return. It is built from four measured dimensions, in order of weight: payback speed, return magnitude, capital at risk and package structure. Scores band into Optimised, Ascending, Developing and At Risk, and always ship with the dimension breakdown — the people-side counterpart of the CAC-payback and LTV:CAC numbers you already run the business on.
Three analytical views of the same decision
Same role benchmarks, three free tools. You're in the New Hire ROI Forecast — the others model the same hire from acquisition cost and cash-flow impact perspectives.