Our Client Saved SEK 4.2M in Year One by Switching from In-House Hiring to a Managed Team

SEK 4.2M. That's not a projection or a model output. That's what one client actually saved in their first year after switching from an in-house data engineering hiring programme to Indpro's managed team model. This post breaks down every line of that number — what they were spending, what they started spending, and the assumptions that connect them. Because a number without a breakdown is just marketing.

The Situation Before: Three Roles, One Bad Hire, Eighteen Months of Trying

This client was a mid-market SaaS company with a 12-person engineering team in Stockholm. They needed to build a data function from scratch: a data engineer, a data analyst, and eventually a data lead. They started hiring in January. By July, they had made one hire — a data engineer who left in month three. By October, they had made a second hire — a data analyst who was technically competent but a poor fit for the team's working style. The data lead role had not been filled.

Eighteen months in, they had spent SEK 2.1M in recruitment fees, salaries, severance, and lost productivity — and they had one functioning data analyst. They weren't incompetent hirers. They were facing a market where the supply of senior data engineers in Stockholm is structurally insufficient to meet demand, where every qualified candidate has three competing offers, and where notice periods stretch six months. The system was working as designed. The design was wrong for their situation.

In November of that year, they engaged Indpro. Within 12 days, they had three engineers running. Within six weeks, their first data pipeline was in production. By the end of month three, they had the data infrastructure that 18 months of hiring had failed to produce.

The Full Cost Breakdown: In-House vs. Managed Team

The SEK 4.2M saving is a 12-month comparison between two scenarios: continuing to hire in-house (the path they were on) versus switching to a managed team. Here's the breakdown.

Cost Line	In-House Hiring (projected)	Indpro Managed Team
Recruitment fees (2–3 roles)	SEK 600K–900K	SEK 0
Time-to-hire vacancy cost (3 × 187 days)	SEK 1.1M (delayed output)	SEK 0 (12 days)
Bad hire risk (SEK 1.8M per incident)	SEK 1.8M (modelled at 1 incident)	SEK 0 (replacement protocol)
Annual salary + costs (3 senior engineers)	SEK 3.2M–3.8M	SEK 2.4M–2.7M (managed fee)
Management overhead + HR	SEK 200K–400K	SEK 0 (delivery lead included)
Total (Year 1)	SEK 6.9M–8.4M	SEK 2.4M–2.7M

The SEK 4.2M saving sits at the conservative end of this range. The top end of the comparison is SEK 5.7M. The key drivers are: recruitment fees avoided (SEK 600K–900K), bad hire cost avoided (SEK 1.8M), and the time-value of the hiring delay — the work that doesn't happen in the months when roles are vacant (modelled at SEK 1.1M based on deferred project revenue).

The SEK 1.8M Bad Hire Figure: Where It Comes From

SEK 1.8M is our calculated true cost of a single bad senior engineering hire. It isn't a round number chosen for impact — it's built from components that most HR teams don't add together in a single calculation. Salary for the period employed: typically SEK 250K–450K (3–6 months before exit). Recruitment cost to replace: SEK 200K–350K (headhunter fee or internal HR time at market value). Severance and legal: SEK 100K–200K depending on length of employment and negotiation. Lost productivity — the work the person didn't do or that others had to cover: SEK 300K–600K. Ramp-up for the replacement: SEK 200K–400K (the time they take to reach full productivity). Management time: SEK 150K–250K.

Add those together and SEK 1.8M is the midpoint of a range that runs SEK 1.2M–2.4M. The number varies by seniority, by how long the mis-hire lasted, and by how costly the team disruption was. But SEK 1.8M is a reasonable benchmark for a senior data engineering role in Stockholm. Hiring managers who have lived through one of these rarely dispute the number. Those who haven't tend to underestimate it significantly.

"Every CTO I talk to who has made a bad senior hire in the last two years comes to the same conclusion: the real cost was never the salary. It was the six months of momentum the team lost while we tried to make it work." — Pavel Siddique, CEO, Indpro AB

What the Client Actually Got for SEK 2.7M

The managed team fee covered three senior data engineers, a named delivery lead who managed the engagement and took part in weekly reviews with the client's CTO, a replacement protocol (any engineer can be replaced within 10 working days if fit is a concern), access to our SKILL.md library and AI Code Factory tooling, and all infrastructure and tooling costs on the Indpro side. No recruitment. No HR admin. No performance management. No severance exposure.

At month six, the client had a running data platform, two production data pipelines, and a functioning analytics layer. Their in-house data analyst (the one functional hire from the original programme) was now supported by a team rather than isolated. At month 12, they extended the engagement and added a fourth engineer. The year-two comparison is even more favourable because the recruitment and bad hire costs are non-recurring for the managed team but would have recurred for the in-house path.

The Honest Limitations of This Comparison

The SEK 4.2M saving applies to this client's specific situation. The range of outcomes varies considerably. The managed team model generates the largest savings when: the in-house hiring market is tight (Stockholm data engineering, specifically), the roles are senior (lower cost differential for mid-level), and the engagement lasts more than six months (the onboarding overhead of the managed model amortises over time). For a company in a talent-abundant market hiring mid-level engineers, the savings will be lower — possibly negligible.

The managed model also involves costs that aren't in the comparison table. The client's engineering leads invested time in the onboarding, the architecture handover, and the ongoing communication overhead of a distributed team. We estimate this at two to four hours per week for a lead engineer in the first month, declining to one hour per week thereafter. That's a real cost that doesn't appear in the SEK figures.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the SEK 4.2M include the cost of bad hires the client actually experienced, or projected hires?

The SEK 4.2M saving is a comparison between the actual managed team cost (SEK 2.7M) and the projected cost of continuing the in-house hiring programme (SEK 6.9M). The SEK 1.8M bad hire component is modelled at one expected incident based on the client's prior hiring trajectory — not a past cost. The recruitment fees and vacancy costs are based on their actual prior 18-month experience annualised.

Can we do a hybrid model — some in-house, some managed?

Yes. Several of our clients run a hybrid: in-house for senior leadership and architecture roles where long-term context and Stockholm presence matter, and managed teams for execution and specialist roles. The economics usually work well for this structure because you're applying managed team leverage to the roles where the hiring gap is widest.

What happens to intellectual property developed by the managed team?

All IP developed by the Indpro managed team for a client engagement belongs to the client. This is standard in our contracts. The SKILL.md files developed for a specific client's codebase are client-owned. Any general-purpose skills or tools we build independently remain Indpro's — but those aren't deployed into client infrastructure.