Case study01 / 05Employment cost intelligence

talentcost

A hiring question answered in under a second, in 158 countries.

The talentcost calculator showing Germany at a €75,000 salary, an employer total cost of €94,250, employee net of €45,180, and a line-by-line statutory breakdown citing the Bundesministerium der Finanzen
Product
talentcost
Category
Employment cost intelligence, SaaS
Services
Product strategy, Brand identity, UI/UX design, Front-end development, AI features
Coverage
158 countries and territories
Live
Visit site
01Context

A salary is never what a hire costs. On top of it sit employer contributions, mandatory benefits and payroll levies, and every country stacks them differently. Until the offer is signed, most hiring teams are guessing at a number that moves their budget by a quarter.

02Challenge

The answer already existed, buried in government rate tables and behind the sales calls of global payroll vendors. Getting it meant a spreadsheet nobody trusted or a demo request that took a week. The design problem was not calculation, it was access and proof: make the number immediate, and make it defensible enough to put in front of a finance director.

03The idea

Show the whole number, and show your work.

Every result returns the employer total cost, the employee take-home and each statutory line that produced them, with the source named and the date it was verified. Nothing is withheld to force a conversation. There is no email wall and no account before you see the answer.

04

Execution

  1. 01

    One screen, one question, one second

    Pick a country, enter a salary, choose gross or net. The interface asks for nothing else. The result loads in under a second and reads top down: the total first, the take-home second, then the contributions, taxes and levies that explain the gap.

    The talentcost calculator with a country selector, salary field and gross or net toggle on the left, and the costed breakdown on the right
  2. 02

    Four layers, drawn instead of listed

    Base salary, employer contributions, mandatory benefits and payroll levies nest as concentric arcs, so the shape of a country reads before any figure does. It turns a table into something you can hold in your head and put in a board deck.

    Concentric arcs labelled payroll taxes and levies, mandatory benefits and employer contributions, wrapping a total employer cost of €94,250 on a base salary of €75,000
  3. 03

    One engine behind 158 markets

    Each market has its own statutory stack modelled line by line rather than approximated from a regional average, and rates are refreshed within fourteen days of a legislative change. The country library is browsable on its own, so a team can compare markets before it has picked one.

    A grid of country cards for the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Brazil, Japan and Canada, each showing its employer cost uplift as a percentage
  4. 04

    From the cost of a role to the worth of a person

    The CV analyser takes a candidate and a target role and returns a match score, a salary range with the reasoning attached, the skills it could confirm and the questions a recruiter should still ask. The same engine then prices the offer, so the conversation about a person and the conversation about the budget happen on one screen.

    A candidate report for a senior backend engineer in Berlin showing a match score of 82 out of 100 and a salary range from €72,000 to €98,000
05 — Result

158Countries and territories modelled line by line

The number, before the offer.

talentcost is live and answering. A hiring lead can price a role in a market they have never hired in, see exactly which statute produced each line, and take the result into a budget conversation without a vendor call in between.

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