The sum was on the back of a board pack, in biro, and it came to £150. A managing director had been asked by his finance director to park the sales director search until the Budget, and he wanted to know exactly what he'd be waiting for.

He isn't alone. The Budget lands on 28th October, and last week the CBI sent the Chancellor, John Healey, its list of what business wants. According to City AM, the headline ask is a £1,000 rise in the employer National Insurance threshold, from £5,000 to £6,000, to encourage firms to take on more young workers.

Cheaper business electricity, rates reform and a simpler tax system are on the list too. And Healey is also looking at ways to make it easier to employ people under 25. Bosses from Tesco, M&S and Sainsbury's sat down with him days before the CBI published. Waiting to see what lands feels sensible, I'll give you that.

What would a £1,000 threshold rise save an employer?

About £150 a year for each person on the payroll, since Business Matters puts the main employer rate at 15% on pay above the threshold and 15% of £1,000 is £150. Those are my sums rather than the CBI's, so get your finance director to check them before you quote me.

But £150 is a proper number if you employ four thousand shop staff. Across a payroll that size it runs to hundreds of thousands. That goes some way to explaining why the retailers were in the room.

For a single hire it's another story entirely.

Take a sales director. The saving on that one salary is the same £150 it would be on a part-time stockroom job, and it vanishes next to everything else a senior hire costs. There's the salary itself, the agency fee if you use one, the months before they're producing anything and the notice period they have to serve first.

Why does the same Budget measure matter so differently to a retailer and a sales team?

Because the threshold is a flat amount per head, so it helps most where payrolls are big and pay is low. A national retailer feels it in every store. But a business hiring one head of sales feels it as a rounding error, and the CBI's own pitch is about young workers rather than leadership appointments.

Anything Healey does for the under-25s points the same way, towards the bottom of the pay scale and not the top.

I'm not saying the Budget is irrelevant to you. It could move your energy bill or your business rates, and a gloomy or cheerful mood in the boardroom does change hiring decisions, whatever the spreadsheet says. Yet the thing that decides a senior sales appointment is a different set of numbers.

Should you hold a senior sales hire until after the Budget?

Usually not. Employer National Insurance changes have tended to start in April rather than the day after the Budget. A senior search takes weeks anyway. Working out when to hire a head of sales is mostly a question about your pipeline and the gap you're carrying, and the announcement on 28th October rarely touches either.

Think about the timeline instead. The sort of sales leader worth chasing is nearly always in a job already, serving a notice period of three months or more (I've seen six), so even a search that kicks off this week probably puts someone through your door in the new year, and by then the Budget is old news.

Start in November, though, and you've shifted the whole thing back a month for a saving you can't be sure of.

And the cost of waiting is harder to see because it never appears on a payroll report. It's the prospects nobody is chasing. The key accounts that drift a little each quarter, and the deal your best rep would have closed if someone senior had been in the room.

What if the Budget makes hiring dearer, not cheaper?

Then you'll be glad you didn't plan around a favour that never came. The CBI's submission is a request, not a promise, and nothing in the City AM report suggests the Treasury has agreed to any of it. And the threshold was cut from £9,100 to £5,000 in the first place, so a £1,000 reversal would only claw back about a quarter of that.

Plan for the cost you can see today, because if the salary you'd be comfortable paying only works with a tax cut that hasn't been announced, the problem sits in the brief and not in the Budget.

What does change the maths on a senior sales hire?

The salary you put on the table, and how quickly you move once a good candidate says yes. A strong sales leader in a cautious market still has options, and an offer sitting below what others are paying will cost you the process long before a threshold rise could save you anything. Our salary guides are a decent place to check where you stand.

Then there's fit, which no tax measure touches. I sat in a motorway services café a while back with a client who'd hired a sales director on pedigree alone, a big name from a bigger company. He stirred the same cup of tea for ten minutes. The new man had never built a pipeline from nothing, and nobody had asked.

And that cost the business far more than any threshold would ever give back.

None of it appears in the Chancellor's red box. It all sits in the brief, the assessment and the speed of the offer. You control those this week, whatever gets announced on the 28th.

The managing director with the board pack did the sensible thing in the end. He kept the biro sum, showed it to his finance director, and the search started before the Chancellor had stood up to speak.

If you've parked a senior sales hire until after the Budget, our sales recruitment team can help you work out whether the wait is worth it.