A back-of-the-envelope estimate I made last year: For a large academic job search, requesting recommendation letters from all candidates instead of waiting until your long list or short list wastes the equivalent of over a month and a half of full-time work.

For 200 applicants to a post (not unsurprising for a broad search in a dept at a major university) where each of their 3 recommenders takes 30 min to send a letter (assuming they already wrote one, so they just need to do minor updates and navigate how to properly upload it) ...