Agentic Hiring ROI Guide: Calculate Savings | Zeko AI

A direct, step-by-step guide to sizing, presenting, and proving your own hiring ROI

Table of Contents

• Getting Started

• When to Use This Guide

• What You Need Before You Start

• Roles and Responsibilities

• The Steps to Follow, In Order

• Decision Points to Apply as You Go

• Handling Internal Pushback

• Templates and Checklists You Can Use Directly

• What to Measure

• A Realistic Timeline

• What Usually Goes Wrong

• Closing Note

Getting Started

Every TA leader eventually gets the same question from someone with budget authority. What is this actually saving us?

Most people answer that with a single percentage pulled from a vendor deck. That number rarely survives the first follow-up question, because nobody behind it can explain where it actually comes from.

This guide is built to fix that. It walks through how to size your own savings from Avya, how to build a case finance will actually trust, and how to defend it when someone pushes back.

Every figure in this guide comes from Zeko AI's own hiring cost model, broken down stage by stage. Nothing here is rounded up or estimated for effect.

Read it start to finish once. After that, treat it as a working reference, and come back to the exact section you need when you're actually building or presenting the case.

When to Use This Guide

This guide applies when any of the following is true for you right now:

• You're preparing a budget case for a pilot or a renewal, and need more than a headline number.

• Finance or leadership has asked for hard numbers before approving anything further.

• You already ran a pilot and now need to prove, with real data, that it worked.

• You're comparing Avya against another vendor and need a methodology you can defend, not just a bigger percentage.

Do not use this guide if your hiring volume is small, a handful of roles a year rarely justifies building a formal ROI case. Informal numbers work fine at that scale, and this guide is built for teams where the math actually moves the needle.

What You Need Before You Start

Do not move past this section until all four of these are in place.

• Your current hiring volume. Hires per year, broken out by role type if you can.

• Your current cost breakdown across resume screening, recruiter calls, interviews, and scheduling.

• Access to Zeko AI's ROI calculator, or a working relationship with your account team who can run it with you.

• Clarity on who signs off internally, finance, TA leadership, or both, and what they'll actually want to see.

Assign a name and a date to each item above before you move to Step 1. A case built without clear ownership tends to stall right before the meeting where it actually matters.

Roles and Responsibilities

Assign these before you start building the case, with a name next to each row, not just a department. A number nobody owns is easy for finance to set aside.

The Steps to Follow, In Order

Work through these six steps in sequence. Skipping ahead, especially past mapping your own funnel, is the most common reason a case falls apart the moment someone asks a real question.

Step 1: Map What Your Funnel Costs Today

• List every stage a candidate passes through. Resume screening, recruiter calls, interviews, scheduling.

• Attach a real cost to each stage. Use loaded hourly rates, not just base salary.

• Multiply by your actual hiring volume, not a number that sounds close enough.

This is exactly the gap that makes most ROI numbers fall apart under questioning, a total with nothing behind it. Zeko AI's own model exists to close that gap by breaking the funnel into stages before adding anything up.

Interviews cost the most, and that tracks with how hiring actually works. A single technical interview can pull in a senior engineer for an hour, sometimes two, and most of that time goes to candidates who never make it past the first round.

Recruiter calls add up the same way. A few minutes per candidate, multiplied across every candidate in the pipeline, not just the one who eventually gets hired.

A few costs that get missed when teams build this estimate too quickly:

• Hiring manager time spent reviewing resumes that never reach an interview.

• Rescheduling overhead when a candidate or interviewer has to move a slot.

• Panel time for roles where more than one person interviews every candidate.

Do not move to Step 2 until you have your own version of this table filled in. Zeko AI's numbers are a structure to copy, not a total to assume matches your organization.

Step 2: Run Your Numbers Through the Model

• Enter your hiring volume and your current cost per stage into the calculator.

• Compare it against what the same funnel costs once Avya handles the repetitive parts.

In Zeko AI's own default example, cost per hire drops from $785 to $171, a 78% reduction. The hiring bar itself does not move. Avya removes the manual repetition from steps that never needed a person doing them by hand every single time.

Scheduling saves the most in percentage terms, because there is nothing left to schedule once a candidate can complete the interview whenever suits them. Interviews save the most in dollar terms, since that is where the most expensive human hours were going before.

Resume screening and recruiter calls still happen, they just take less time per candidate. Avya handles the first pass and only sends through what genuinely needs a person's judgment, which is what keeps the process from turning into a black box nobody trusts.

Cost is not the only line that moves. Time to fill drops too, in Zeko AI's own example a role that takes 44 days to fill today takes 8 days with Avya's async interviews, 36 days saved per hire. Most of that comes back because candidates complete interviews on their own schedule instead of everyone waiting for six calendars to align.

Put together, the per-hire savings works out to $614. That is the number to multiply by your own hiring volume in Step 4, not the total from the default example.

Do not move to Step 3 until you have your own before-and-after numbers, not just the default example above.

Step 3: Separate Direct Savings From the Rest

• List direct savings on their own. Cost per hire and time to fill, both measurable and easy for finance to check.

• List soft savings separately. Consistency across hiring managers, fewer bad hires, a better candidate experience.

Keep these two categories apart when you present the case. Direct savings are what finance can verify on the spot, using numbers you already gave them. Soft savings support the case, but they should never carry the headline, because they cannot be checked the same way.

This distinction matters more than it sounds. A case that blends the two invites the exact question you do not want in the room, how much of this number is actually real.

Step 4: Build the Full Case, Not Just the Percentage

• Include the per-hire savings and the annual total for your own volume, not the default example.

• Include the ROI multiple and the payback period alongside the cost reduction, not instead of it.

In Zeko AI's own example, at 120 hires a year, the manual funnel costs $94,200 annually. Running that same funnel through Avya costs $20,520. That works out to a 4.6x return, for every dollar spent on Avya, the funnel saves $4.60.

The investment pays for itself in 4 months. After that, the rest of the year is pure savings, based on Zeko AI's own default assumptions for this example.

A single percentage rarely convinces a CFO on its own, since percentages can be built from almost anything. A payback period usually does, because it answers the question every budget owner is actually asking, how long until this stops costing money and starts saving it.

Step 5: Present and Get Sign-Off

• Lead with the stage-by-stage breakdown, not the total. A table survives scrutiny better than a headline number ever does.

• Bring your own volume and your own numbers into the room, not the default example from this guide.

• Name the caveats before anyone asks. It reads as more credible, not less.

It also helps to bring proof that the platform itself is trustworthy at scale, not just cost-effective. Zeko AI is used by 150 or more enterprises, is SOC 2 Type II certified, GDPR compliant, and ISO 27001 certified, and candidates rate their interview experience 4.8 out of 5 on average, including candidates who were not selected.

None of that replaces your own cost numbers, but it answers the question that usually comes right after the ROI number, can we actually trust this platform with our candidates and our data.

Step 6: Track It After You Launch

• Re-run the same funnel numbers 90 days after go-live.

• Compare the actual result against your original case, not against Zeko AI's default example.

• Report the gap either way. A case built on projections only earns trust once, a case with real tracked results earns it every time after.

This step gets skipped more than any other, usually because the case already got approved and nobody circles back. That is exactly why it belongs on the calendar before launch, not as an afterthought once the first month gets busy.

Decision Points to Apply as You Go

Every ROI case built this way runs into the same handful of situations. Use the table below as a lookup whenever one comes up, rather than reading it start to finish.

Handling Internal Pushback

You will get questions before you get budget approved. Answer directly and point back to your own numbers instead of relitigating the whole case each time.

Templates and Checklists You Can Use Directly

These cover the moments that matter most when building and presenting this case. Use them as-is, or adapt the tone, but keep the substance.

Funnel Cost Worksheet (fill in your own numbers)

Resume screening: $___ | Recruiter calls: $___ | Interviews: $___ | Scheduling: $___ | Total per hire: $___ | Hires per year: ___ | Annual total: $___

Budget Case One-Pager

• Current cost per hire, and current annual spend at your volume.

• Projected cost per hire with Avya, and projected annual spend.

• Annual savings, ROI multiple, and payback period, side by side, not buried in a paragraph.

• Two or three caveats, named upfront, not left for someone else in the room to find.

Pre-Presentation Checklist

• Own funnel numbers gathered, not just the default example from this guide.

• Finance has reviewed the assumptions before the formal meeting.

• Stage-by-stage table ready, not just a single headline figure.

• Caveats section included in the deck itself, not saved for a follow-up question.

What to Measure

Track these both before you present the case and after you launch. A case built once and never revisited loses credibility fast.

A Realistic Timeline

Use this pacing as a default. Adjust exact dates to your own calendar, but keep the sequence and the gaps between phases.

What Usually Goes Wrong

Every mistake below traces back to a step that got skipped to save time, usually one this guide explicitly warned against. Most surface only after the case has already been approved.

• The team presents Zeko AI's default numbers instead of their own. Fix: never skip Step 2, run your own funnel before the meeting, not the example from this guide.

• A headline percentage goes out with no stage breakdown attached. Fix: always lead with the table, not the total on its own.

• The ROI case gets built once and never revisited after launch. Fix: put the 90-day re-check on the calendar before you launch, not after.

• Soft savings get folded into the same number as direct savings. Fix: keep them in separate sections, every time, no exceptions.

• A second business unit reuses the first unit's case without re-running the numbers. Fix: treat every rollout as its own case, built from that unit's real funnel.

• Caveats get left out of the deck and only surface when someone asks a hard question live. Fix: put them on their own slide, stated plainly, before anyone has to ask.

Closing Note

The math behind this is simple. Less manual work per hire, faster time to fill, no change to evaluation quality.

None of it requires a leap of faith. Every part of the case can be checked before you present it, and checked again after you launch.

Teams that skip the early steps to get to a bigger number faster usually end up back at Step 1 anyway, just with a case nobody trusts and more scrutiny the second time around.

Get your own numbers with Zeko AI, or see how Avya handles each stage.