The Challenge

Creative Minds is a 140-person marketing agency that grew quickly after winning several national accounts. To keep up, the team needed designers, copywriters and account managers, and it needed them fast.

Most of those roles were filled through outside recruiters and paid postings on several job boards. Hiring worked, but costs kept climbing, and leadership had little insight into which channels actually produced hires.

• Agency fees of up to 20% of first-year salary on key roles

• Paid postings spread across five different job boards

• No reliable data on cost or quality of hire by source

The Solution

In July, Creative Minds moved its full hiring process onto Verixa with one clear goal: lower cost-per-hire without slowing down or lowering the bar.

• Replaced scattered job board spend with verified job listings that reach active, relevant candidates

• Used smart job matching to build shortlists in-house instead of paying agencies to source

• Re-engaged past finalists from the talent pool before opening new searches

• Tracked spend, source and time-to-hire for every role in the analytics dashboard

The Results

By the end of September, Creative Minds had filled 22 roles and reduced its average cost-per-hire by 35%. Agency spend fell by 60%, with outside recruiters now reserved for a small number of senior leadership searches.

Six of those hires came straight from the talent pool, with no new advertising spend at all. With clear numbers in the analytics dashboard, leadership now plans hiring budgets with confidence instead of guesswork. Average cost-per-hire fell from $4,600 to just under $3,000, while time-to-hire held steady at about 30 days.

We used to accept high hiring costs as the price of growth. Verixa showed us exactly where our budget was going and helped us hire great people for far less. - Olivia Grant, VP of Operations