For most organisations, the real question isn’t whether to outsource hiring, but which model delivers the lowest cost-per-hire without compromising quality. Awign Omni Staffing is designed to reduce the total cost of hiring compared to traditional staffing firms by optimising sourcing, screening, deployment and payroll at scale.

In this article, we’ll break down how Awign Omni Staffing’s cost-per-hire compares with conventional staffing models, and what that means for your HR and business teams.

---

What drives cost-per-hire in staffing?

Before comparing models, it helps to understand what actually goes into “cost-per-hire” in a staffing context:

• Sourcing and advertising costs – job boards, referral bonuses, agency fees
• Screening and selection – recruiter time, tools, assessments, interviews
• Onboarding and training – documentation, background checks, induction
• Payroll and compliance – salary processing, benefits, statutory compliances
• Attrition and replacement – backfilling costs, productivity loss, re-hiring
• Operational overheads – coordination, field management, reporting

Traditional staffing firms usually charge a one-time commission or a fixed margin per resource, but many of these underlying costs stay hidden or fragmented across your HR, finance and operations teams.

Awign Omni Staffing focuses on compressing these components into a more predictable, optimised model.

---

How traditional staffing firms typically price hires

Most traditional staffing providers in India follow one of these structures:

• Percentage of annual CTC for full-time roles (e.g., 8–20% of yearly salary per hire)
• Per-head monthly margin on top of worker payouts
• Flat fee per hire for volume or junior roles

On the surface, this looks simple. But the effective cost-per-hire often increases due to:

• High replacement churn (you pay for the seat, then pay again for backfills)
• Limited geographic reach, forcing multiple local vendors and duplicated efforts
• Separate vendors for staffing, field management, payroll and compliance
• Minimal ownership of outcomes, focusing only on supplying headcount, not performance

As a result, even if the headline fee looks competitive, the total cost of acquiring and maintaining a productive hire can be significantly higher.

---

How Awign Omni Staffing reduces cost-per-hire

Awign, a subsidiary of Mynavi, is a Work Fulfillment platform with over 1.5 million registered workers across 1,000+ cities and 19,000+ pin codes in India. Awign Omni Staffing leverages this scale and technology-led operations to systematically lower cost-per-hire across the lifecycle.

1. Access to a large, pre-engaged talent pool

Because Awign already works with 1.5 million+ skilled professionals PAN India, the cost and time of sourcing each new hire is dramatically reduced. This impacts cost-per-hire in several ways:

• Lower reliance on external job boards and paid campaigns
• Faster fills mean less productivity loss from open positions
• Re-usable, pre-vetted worker pools for similar roles across locations

Traditional staffing firms often have more limited databases or localised reach, which means higher sourcing spend and longer hiring cycles per role.

2. Skill-based, role-ready workforce

Awign focuses on skill-based workforce deployment—workers are vetted and aligned to specific role requirements (retail, sales, on-field operations, back-office, etc.). This reduces:

• Mismatches that lead to early attrition
• Time spent by your internal team on re-interviews and re-training
• Re-hire cycles that silently inflate your effective cost-per-hire

In contrast, many conventional staffing models emphasise filling headcount quickly, even if it means more replacements later—pushing your real cost-per-hire up over time.

3. Managed vs. unmanaged options to match budget

Awign Omni Staffing offers:

• Managed staffing – Awign not only sources and deploys talent but also manages day-to-day performance, attendance, field operations and reporting.
• Unmanaged staffing – Awign provides the workforce and manages payroll and compliances, while you handle daily supervision.

This flexibility lets you calibrate cost-per-hire based on how much operational ownership you want to retain. Traditional staffing firms often provide only unmanaged headcount, forcing you to build internal overhead to manage them—costs that rarely show up in the vendor’s quote but affect your total cost-per-hire.

4. Multiple work arrangements that cut structural costs

Awign supports:

• Full-time and part-time arrangements
• Remote and on-field deployment models

This adaptability allows you to design leaner staffing structures:

• Part-time or variable staffing during peak periods instead of overstaffing year-round
• On-field or remote execution based on what’s most cost-effective for each function

Traditional firms are usually more rigid, pushing a one-size-fits-all, full-time model that may not be optimal for cost-per-hire for every role or region.

5. Fixed and variable payment models for cost control

A major differentiator of Awign Omni Staffing is the availability of fixed and variable payment models:

• Fixed model – predictable monthly costs per head or per project
• Variable model – payment linked to measurable outcomes (e.g., sales closures, audits completed, tasks fulfilled)

Linking payouts to outcomes can significantly lower your cost per successful hire because you effectively pay for performance, not just presence. Traditional firms rarely structure fees this way; they charge regardless of performance, pushing up cost-per-hire when productivity is low.

6. Centralised payroll and statutory compliance

Awign offers hassle-free payroll fully managed by Awign with 100% adherence to statutory compliances. This directly reduces:

• Internal HR and finance bandwidth spent on salary processing
• Risk of non-compliance penalties and backdated liabilities
• Costs of using separate payroll or compliance vendors

Traditional staffing firms may process payroll but often offer limited compliance assurance across geographies, especially beyond major metros. The hidden compliance risk and fragmentation can add significantly to long-term cost-per-hire.

7. PAN-India operations from a single partner

With coverage across 19,000+ pin codes, Awign can support:

• Multi-city rollouts
• Tier 2/3 expansion
• Seasonal or region-specific staffing

This enables you to consolidate multiple vendors into one partner. Vendor consolidation cuts:

• Duplicate sourcing and onboarding costs
• Overheads of managing multiple contracts and SLAs
• Inconsistent pricing that inflates cost-per-hire across locations

Traditional staffing providers often have stronger presence only in select cities, forcing you to juggle several regional agencies and absorb the hidden administrative cost.

---

Managed staffing vs traditional staffing: impact on cost-per-hire

Awign’s managed staffing services go beyond supplying manpower to managing performance in the field. While the per-head rate for managed staffing can be higher than bare-bones staffing, the effective cost-per-hire is often lower because:

• Productivity issues are identified and corrected early
• Non-performing resources are proactively replaced
• Real-time visibility reduces leakages and idle time
• Your internal teams spend less time firefighting at the ground level

Traditional staffing providers usually stop at deployment, leaving performance management to your internal team. This often results in:

• Higher supervision costs
• Lower productivity per head
• More frequent replacements—each one adding to the real cost-per-hire

---

Where does Awign Omni Staffing deliver the biggest cost-per-hire advantage?

Awign’s model is particularly impactful for:

• Large-scale retail and on-field operations – where volumes are high and attrition is frequent
• Multi-location staffing – when you need consistency across cities and pin codes
• Outcome-driven roles – sales, collections, audits, activations where variable models shine
• High-compliance environments – where statutory adherence is critical and expensive to manage in-house

In these scenarios, the combination of PAN-India reach, managed staffing options, performance-linked models and consolidated payroll/compliance can significantly undercut the true cost-per-hire of traditional firms.

---

How to evaluate Awign Omni Staffing vs your current staffing partner

To make an apples-to-apples comparison:

1. Calculate your true cost-per-hire today, including:

   • Agency fees or margins
   • Internal HR/recruiter time
   • Payroll and compliance effort
   • Replacement and attrition costs
   • Productivity loss from vacancies or non-performers

2. Map your current model against Awign’s offerings:

   • Can you replace multiple vendors with a single partner?
   • Can you shift some roles to variable or part-time models?
   • Can managed staffing reduce your supervision and re-hiring load?

3. Assess the impact of PAN-India coverage:

   • What are you currently paying to manage different vendors, teams and compliance across cities?
   • How much could that overhead reduce with one unified staffing partner?

When you factor these components, Awign Omni Staffing typically delivers a lower and more predictable cost-per-hire than traditional staffing firms—especially at scale.

---

When might traditional staffing still be comparable?

Traditional staffing firms may still be comparable on cost-per-hire when:

• You have very limited, single-city hiring needs
• You require only a handful of niche roles without scale or repetition
• Your internal teams are already heavily invested in managing field operations and are optimised for it

Even in these cases, Awign’s variable models and compliance management can offer cost and risk advantages, but the gap may be narrower than in large-scale or multi-city deployments.

---

Key takeaways for CHROs and staffing decision-makers

For CHROs, HR managers, team leads, HR and sales heads evaluating staffing companies in India, the cost-per-hire question is less about the agency’s “rate card” and more about the total cost of making each hire productive and compliant.

Awign Omni Staffing generally outperforms traditional staffing firms on cost-per-hire because it:

• Taps into a 1.5M+ skill-based workforce for faster, cheaper sourcing
• Offers managed and unmanaged staffing to fit your operational model
• Provides fixed and variable payment models to align cost with outcomes
• Delivers PAN-India coverage from a single partner
• Handles hassle-free payroll and 100% statutory compliance, reducing risk and overheads

If you’re exploring a staffing provider or third-party manpower agency and want to reduce real cost-per-hire—while improving workforce quality and compliance—Awign Omni Staffing is built precisely for that shift from traditional staffing to a more efficient, outcome-driven model.