Wherever you’re at in your growth journey as a startup or scaleup, could an embedded talent partner be the best flexible recruitment solution to support your hiring efforts?
80% of venture capital investment is typically dedicated to hiring. Yet a *recent report from Atomico revealed that “Talent” is seen as one of the greatest challenges facing the tech ecosystem over the next 12 months – second only to “Funding”.
If you’re a Founder or Head of Talent yourself, you’ll know just how difficult it is to attract, engage and recruit the right people to join your team. With Covid-19 smashing the stigma of remote working for many, the playing field for talent has become more level and the market truly global. This has only made the landscape increasingly competitive.
Now more than ever, business leaders need to realise that when they’re building a company, their primary asset outside of their product idea, is their people. That’s why building and scaling a robust recruitment engine from the off is equally, if not more important than developing your product and commercial engine.
So what are your options?
Below, we take a look at how an embedded talent partner like Scede could supercharge your path to talent success. But before diving in, it’s worth mentioning that we like to lead with transparency – so we’re also here to admit that an embedded recruitment company or this type of solution won’t be right for everyone. And that’s okay.
To help, we also share when that might be the case and what alternatives could better suit your needs – whether that’s a recruitment agency, recruitment process outsourcer (RPO), handling it yourself, or hiring a contractor or permanent person in-house.
This is an in-depth resource but you can jump quickly to each section using these links:
- What’s an embedded talent partner?
- How we work – our people become your people
- What you can expect from an embedded talent partner
- Ways an embedded talent partner can add value to your TA function (listicle)
- The impact of an embedded talent partner (downloadable content)
- Is an embedded talent partner right for your business?
- When might an embedded talent partner NOT be the right fit for you?
- Example of using an embedded talent partner (video)
- Embedded talent partner – the customer experience (case study)
- Embedded talent partner – the recruiter experience (video)
Short on time?
See the impact our embedded talent service has had on hiring success for the likes of Mollie, Automattic, Graphcore, Onfido and others via our “case studies” page here.
Or download this handy infographic to discover more about Scede’s Embedded Talent service.
What’s an embedded talent partner?
Simply put, an embedded talent partner is a company that deploys highly experienced teams of recruitment professionals into your business to either act as, or augment your existing Talent Acquisition team. They come on board to take care of either a portion or the entirety of your hiring plan.
Instead of representing an “external” service provider and individuals working across multiple clients, an embedded talent partner becomes your dedicated internal hiring resource for a predefined period of time; fully adopting your brand identity (using your email systems/signatures), and immersing themselves into your company vision and mission, culture, values, and ways of working.
Embedded talent isn’t a new concept. It’s something that we’ve been refining our approach to here at Scede since we were founded back in 2013. However, it’s becoming increasingly popular in Europe specifically, with more and more embedded talent outfits emerging over the past few years. In the US, what we do is typically referred to as “Recruitment-as-a-service” – or “RaaS”.
What you can expect from an embedded talent partner
Recruitment, after all, is a craft – and when you engage an embedded talent partner like us here at Scede, often you’re getting much more than a successfully delivered hiring plan.
Depending on the phase of growth you’re at, an embedded talent partner can build your entire talent function from the ground up, creating a solid recruitment infrastructure that you can rely on as you scale.
Or if you have an established talent function already, they can partner with you to ensure your hiring process is effective and efficient as you grow.
Blending RPO, agency and in-house recruitment
We like to think that embedded talent blends the strongest qualities of three different recruitment models: recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), an agency model and in-house talent acquisition.
RPO
Similar to RPOs, embedded talent partners use a data-driven approach to refine hiring processes, identify areas of improvement, advise on the right recruitment tech and tooling, develop your employer branding and deliver a certain volume of your hires in a given timeframe.
Agency recruitment
Similar to agencies, embedded talent partners take care of a portion of your hiring plan and are driven by making those hires for you.
Speed to hire is often a factor here, with both embedded talent partners and agencies proactively headhunting top candidates. Agencies have access to specific candidate networks, whereas we know what to look for when it comes to scaling teams for hypergrowth tech companies.
In-house talent acquisition
Just like having an in-house recruiter, embedded talent partners build strong relationships with key stakeholders across the business. They deeply understand hiring managers’ needs, as well as the culture and values of your organisation so that these can be effectively communicated to and assessed for in candidates.
Embedded talent partners tend to manage the entire candidate journey from outreach to engagement and hire. They also care about your long-term success, so partner on both the tactical and strategic recruitment initiatives; translating your business plan into a hiring plan, compensation and benefits, recruitment tools and tech, interview process optimisation, referrals, talent market mapping for new locations, candidate experience, DE&I, and more.
How we work – we work with you, it’s a partnership not a service
All too often, the recruitment function of a business can sometimes be seen as a ‘service’. Candidates are sourced, interviewed and placed into roles – a transactional process that delivers the objective, but nothing more. With an embedded talent model, the relationship between the client and the talent partner is more of a collaborative partnership, with mutual investment from both parties.
Of course, an embedded talent team will also source, interview and place candidates into roles, just as an internal TA team would do, but there’s a huge difference in the experience of working with an embedded talent partner.
Startups and scaleups that choose to use an embedded talent model to supercharge hiring as they grow already recognise the value of recruitment. In fact, repeat Founders are more likely to invest in an embedded talent partner to support hiring efforts, compared to less experienced, first-time Founders. They know the level of time and financial resources that go into scaling teams well, so make a conscious decision to collaborate with an expert on recruitment at the early stages to build strong foundations quickly for sustainable hiring success.
Our people become your people
Here at Scede, we call our way of working our “one team” approach – whereby we’re a true extension of your team.
Our people are passionate about recruitment as a craft and driven by our value of Significant Impact. So for us, it’s not about getting “bums on seats” whatever the cost. It’s about finding the right talent, for the right role at your company, giving them an awesome candidate experience, and making hiring managers (and you) happy.
We also partner with you on all strategic and tactical Talent Acquisition matters; from engaging and hiring top candidates to DE&I strategies, tech and tooling implementation, recruitment process optimisation, salary benchmarking, talent market mapping – and pretty much everything in between.
For us, it’s about making talent a powerful component of your scaleup for the long term.
What does the team set-up look like in reality?
As soon as we kick off conversations about a potential partnership with you, we’ll be transparent. Initially, you might think you need five extra recruiters. But once you tell us your headcount targets, we’ll reverse engineer this into our performance model and advise on the right team size and composition to deliver hiring success.
If you require fewer recruitment resources from us than you originally thought – we’ll be honest with you about that.
You’ll then pay a fixed monthly fee for that team over a predefined period of time – making Scede a predictable, set investment for your budgeting. No hidden fees, no variable cost for specific individuals and certainly no nasty surprises. And flexible enough to scale the team size up, or down, if and when needed.
Not all embedded talent partners operate as we do. But an embedded Scede team will always consist of a Project Lead who is committed to delivering your hiring success, alongside a People Enablement Manager, who is committed to driving the performance of each individual team member we dedicate to you.
The team will have accountability for delivering hires against certain hiring pipelines and volumes. This way, you get the output and results of having a larger internal talent team, minus having to find the capacity to manage them – giving you more time to keep doing what you do best.
How do they become “embedded”?
Upon launch, our team will go through your full onboarding experience, meet with key stakeholders, and join the internal TA team and company-wide meetings where possible. They can also join you “onsite” at your headquarters, or global office locations for induction days, face-to-face time, events and larger function-specific workshops.
Our client rituals are also designed to ensure your Scede team feel embedded, from weekly meetings and hiring data reporting and updates, to quarterly business reviews. This also enables us to make sure that your approach to hiring keeps up with the ever-changing market, and recruitment at your organisation can innovate at the same pace as other functions in the business.
What we offer isn’t “rent a recruiter”. Our approach allows our people to get a deeper, more holistic understanding of how your business is looking to grow, understand areas of priority for hiring and get to know not just the products you’re building, but your position in the market as well – ultimately enabling them to have a greater impact on your growth journey.
What does this mean for your candidate experience?
Being deeply rooted within your company, our embedded recruiters build positive, authentic relationships with candidates, meaning an exceptional experience is managed and delivered throughout their interview journey with you.
Rather than settle for giving a high-level overview of your company, they nurture genuine relationships with stakeholders across the business to get a deeper understanding of your culture, your teams, and how you operate.
It’s thanks to being this immersed, that our people can accurately reflect your employee value proposition and using market intel, help you to shine against your competitors.
The impact of knowledge-sharing at Scede
When you hire teams from embedded talent partners like Scede, you benefit from not only the brilliant minds on the team curated for you – you get access to the expertise and hiring hive mind that is our global Scede community.
Having scaled teams for 80+ companies over the last 8 years, we’ve developed the experience, knowledge base and muscle memory to tackle your hiring challenges efficiently and effectively as soon as they arise.
Our people really have “been-there-and-done-that” multiple times over when it comes to hiring in that fast-growing environment – so can apply tried and tested techniques and even catch problems before they happen.
Think of us as having lived the challenges you’re facing today, witnessed the common pitfalls and mistakes made – all so that you don’t have to. This means your speed to resolution can be quicker and less painful.
Here are some ways an embedded talent partner like Scede can add value to your TA function and drive long-term hiring success:
- ATS (applicant tracking system) implementation – Whether your current ATS needs an overhaul or you’re adopting a new one, embedded talent professionals can get you prepared, set up and running with a system that meets your business’ needs.
- Recruitment metrics, reporting & analytics – Our embedded talent partners have a data-led approach to recruitment and can provide you with sophisticated reporting and analytics to track your goals and communicate hiring progress across the organisation.
- Data-led market insights & research – By doing market research around your hiring plan, embedded recruiters can give you data insights into things like market mapping and competitor analysis, recruitment metrics benchmarks, compensation and benefits trends analysis, projected times to hire, demand volume of qualified candidates and more.
- Headcount & workforce planning – Putting the right people into the right roles at the right time is vital in a fast-growing scaleup. Embedded talent partners use your projected growth data to align your hiring plan with your company’s goals – making sure you’ve got the key hires you need in place to scale successfully.
Here’s more on the workforce planning process:
The Workforce Planning Process: How To Get Ahead Of Recruitment Demand, The Sensible Way.
(Includes a workforce planning ‘project planner’, workforce guidance podcast and the workforce planning process for startups)
- Employer branding – When embedded teams become one with yours, they learn and embrace your brand inside out. This means you get the opportunity to showcase your reputation, employer brand, workplace culture and values through our team to every candidate and really show them why your company should be their next career move.
- Building your recruitment infrastructure – The purpose of using an embedded talent service is to enhance your own talent acquisition function and supercharge your hiring as you scale. Systems, processes and strategies are implemented to build a solid foundation for your TA function. Our ultimate goal is to see you continue to succeed with this infrastructure and approach in place – even once we’ve gone.
- Building a database of candidates for your future talent pipelines – Your embedded talent partner can build and maintain a database of candidates, their skill sets, what roles they’ve applied for and more, so you have ready-made candidate pipelines for your future hiring needs.
- Senior hiring – Having extensive industry expertise to draw from, embedded talent professionals provide networks to fill specific niche roles, headhunting senior talent and more challenging hires.
- Interview process design & interviewer training – We assist with crafting compelling job descriptions, competency and skills testing, establishing a projected time to hire and refining interview stages. They can also offer training to relevant managers and help identify stakeholders to conduct interviews.
- Training on hiring strategies – Recruiters that work in an embedded talent model are highly experienced and have most likely encountered your hiring challenges before. This means they’re fully equipped to provide you with the best solutions and share that knowledge with you.
- Candidate attraction strategy – By elevating your company’s employer brand and building your presence and reputation in the talent market, we’re able to attract the best talent globally. We establish methods for identifying, attracting, and nurturing top talent.
- Exceptional candidate experience – Embedded talent partners mostly focus on sourcing candidates in the ‘passive market’ – which means they’re going after the best talent rather than relying on applications and the available talent. This means that the candidate experience is managed exceptionally well and positive, authentic relationships are built throughout.
- DE&I strategy – Wherever your business is on its diversity, equity and inclusion journey, an embedded talent partner will collaborate with you on embedding DE&I into your recruitment process and make sure your hiring plan reflects your diversity goals.
Downloadable content!
Download & share this handy infographic
Is an embedded talent partner right for you?
In short, it depends on what phase of growth you’re at. You might be at Seed or Series A and looking to establish the foundations of a successful talent function. Or you could be a fast-growing scaleup with a surge in hiring on the horizon, but your current team lacks the capacity and capability to cope.
In both instances, an embedded talent partner can help.
Let’s look at why you might choose an embedded talent partner
Exponential growth is on the horizon and TA capacity is limited
The company has a surge in growth upcoming and some lofty hiring targets to hit across your tech, commercial, or operations teams. Your current talent acquisition team doesn’t have the capacity to manage the recruitment load coming in, so you need additional resources, quickly.
Demand for recruiters has sky-rocketed. Gone are the days of it just being difficult to hire great tech talent. It’s now difficult to hire great talent to hire that great tech talent. The pain point has somewhat doubled.
Competition for recruitment professionals is fierce and on top of that, sourcing, onboarding and getting an internal recruiter performant can take significant investment in both time and resource investment. You might be six months out from your first hire, which is a scary prospect with ambitious deadlines and a looming product roadmap on the horizon.
Embedded talent partners have a blueprint for hiring success; from role intake to knowing where and how to source, engage, and secure the right candidates for you. We can have a team ready to deploy for you within 4 – 6 weeks who will hit the ground running from day one. We give you a performant and consistent delivery engine when it comes to recruitment – giving you some peace of mind.
You don’t currently have the capability to make the hires needed
You can see hard to fill, or niche roles on the upcoming headcount plan. But your existing team doesn’t have the experience in sourcing, engaging and hiring these types of profiles at the pace needed.
Naturally, you want to secure the best talent possible for your business. And if you’re looking to hire internal recruiters that specialise in JavaScript, C++ Engineers, or niche AI talent, these can be both pricey (with added costs for employee insurance and benefits) and hard to find – and if/when demand for that pipeline diminishes, so does their role and responsibilities.
That’s where an embedded talent partner can come in.
They’ll globally source these candidates exclusively for you and the specific roles you’re trying to fill. They tend to know the market inside out, and partner closely with your hiring managers to find the best match with the right skills – nurturing a positive, authentic candidate relationship, and ultimately increasing your chances of an individual accepting a role.
You want a solution that doesn’t just deliver hires, it makes an impact
At the early stages, trying to achieve ambitious hiring plans whilst also building or shaping the TA function can feel like fixing the plane whilst trying to fly it with 250 people on board.
So you like the sound of what an RPO can offer. Future-proofing your recruitment process by investing in getting it set up for success is key to scaling your business. You know an agency won’t provide you with anything more than putting people into your roles, so an RPO sounds like a good option.
However, you need quick implementation, faster speed to performance, impact, and more flexibility and agility to adapt to your scope of work. You also want experienced people who know how early-stage companies operate.
That’s where you might consider embedded talent instead.
An embedded talent team offers support, training and advice on building your recruitment infrastructure and improving your hiring process. Using data, we identify and resolve blockers across your talent pipelines, dramatically reducing your time to hire and giving you the quality results you need, faster and more consistently.
For us, it’s critical to leave our partners stronger than when we found them. We’re not a forever solution, so when we go our separate ways, we want to ensure your team is upskilled on all of the above and that we leave you set for the future – solid, scalable, and successful.
“Embedded teams are deployed to make a significant and rapid impact to the businesses they work with. Sometimes this can mean we (Scede) might reverse-engineer existing processes and plans, discover new ways of working or have suggestions to implement using expertise learned from previous partnerships. To truly get the most out of working with an embedded talent partner, stakeholders and decision-makers tend to be open-minded and adaptable to change.” – Nick Bryce, People Enablement Director, Scede.
You want to maximise your recruitment spend
Agency fees can be notoriously high, sometimes as high as 35% of the role’s gross salary. On the flip side, hiring additional resources internally, permanently, comes with long-term investment to consider – both management time and associated costs – salary, insurance, benefits etc.
If you’re in the lead-up to function, exit or an IPO, you may also be struggling to get sign-off on additional internal headcount.
An embedded talent partner could be a more affordable solution over a 1 – 2 year period. With a fixed amount paid monthly over the partnership, it’s a predictable expenditure, which can work wonders for your cash flow too.
You also have the flexibility to scale your embedded talent team up or down to match your hiring needs – instead of hiring an internal person to meet a sudden spike in demand, then having to let them go further down the line.
Using an embedded talent partner – example case study
US-founded tech company Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack and Tumblr used an embedded talent service to increase their engineering headcount quickly, at volume, and without compromising the quality of hires.
Automattic knew the business didn’t currently have the correct resources within their own talent acquisition team to meet increased hiring demands, so they looked to utilise a talent partner for hiring expertise and global recruitment support.
Read the full Automattic case study here
Watch a short video about using an embedded talent partner:
When might an embedded talent partner NOT be the right fit for you?
As we said before, we value transparency and know it’s better to be candid upfront.
Sometimes, an embedded talent partner absolutely isn’t the right option for you. Here’s when that might be the case.
Volume of roles
If the volume of roles you’re looking for support on is quite low – say 1 to 15 – and you’re at the very early stages of growth, an embedded talent partnership won’t make much sense for you.
Instead, we’d recommend going out to and exhausting the networks of your team through referral drives. In addition, at this point having Founders or Founding team members in the business set aside time for recruitment can be a game-changer. They know the company inside out, and can find the right individuals to join you on your mission; people who are aligned with your values can help you to reach your milestones and importantly will add to your culture.
The cost of an embedded talent partner
The overall cost associated with working with an embedded talent partner could sometimes be prohibitive – especially if you’re at the early stages and awaiting additional capital to invest further into hiring.
If the growth you’re experiencing isn’t sustainable and it’s a short-term spike in hiring or a 3-month capacity issue you’re trying to solve, committing to an embedded talent partnership won’t make the most commercial sense for you.
You don’t want to risk having an experienced team sat there with no roles to fill somewhere down the line.
Here, you might prefer to begin building your TA team internally and seeing how performant they are against your headcount goals. Or an agency could certainly support you on a more short-term contingent basis.
You already have a fully-staffed, well-oiled recruitment engine
What makes an embedded talent partner so effective, is their ability to have a more holistic, long-term impact on your hiring success.
If you already have a fully performant team, little to no blockers to achieving your hiring goals, and plenty of capacity and capability to manage the volume of roles and recruitment milestones coming your way – you’ve got it covered.
If there are certain, project-based improvements that are needed or initiatives that you would love to have support on on a more ad-hoc basis, an RPO or Talent Consultancy such as People Collective could be a great option for you.
Embedded Talent Partner – The Customer Experience
Startups or scaleups going through hypergrowth typically work with embedded talent partners because they don’t have the internal capacity and/or capability to deliver on their hiring plan.
As an example, a startup may have raised significant funding to scale but needs to increase its headcount extensively over the next 12 to 24 months and more recruiters, alongside improvements across the TA function are needed to do so.
To give you a real-world look at this, we spoke to global AI tech company, Graphcore, about why they sought out the expertise of Scede and how some of their specific hiring challenges were solved.
Today, Graphcore has international hubs including London, Palo Alto, Shanghai, Beijing and Munich – but initially, the Bristol-based company had no recruitment processes or infrastructure in place to achieve their talent ambitions.
“As a company, we were climbing Mount Everest. Scede got us to Basecamp from a hiring, recruiting systems, processes, and structures perspective. And they’ve left us with the right supplies we need to continue to scale that mountain even further.” – Guy Franklin, Talent Acquisition Director, Graphcore
Graphcore enlisted Scede to help them double their engineering headcount over a one-year period because as Graphcore’s SVP of People, Sophie Froment commented, “When you’re looking at hiring more than 200 people over the course of a year, traditional solutions don’t work”.
We deployed a team of embedded talent partners into Graphcore, including specialist sourcers, and implemented best-in-class ATS and CRM (customer relationship management) software. To deliver quality and quantity of talent for them, we also designed a scalable engineering hiring process, whilst recruiting their TA Director and establishing comprehensive recruitment reporting and analytics.
Learn more about Graphcore’s partnership with Scede here.
“Scede haven’t just hired great people for us, they’ve set the foundations for the next 4-5 years in terms of Graphcore’s growth and story.” – Guy Franklin, Talent Acquisition Director, Graphcore
Quick-view this partnership story as a visual?
Easily download Graphcore X Scede success story PDF 👇
Embedded Talent Partner – The Recruiter Experience
If you have a genuine passion for recruitment and enabling companies to achieve hiring success, becoming an embedded talent partner might be for you.
You might have experience within an RPO, agency, or internally – but you want to take your career to the next level and step into a role that balances hiring plan delivery with more consultative recruitment.
Embedded recruiters want to represent a brand, its values, embrace a company’s work culture and really get to know the client and business. You’ll get the opportunity to partner with Founders and Talent leaders at some world-leading tech companies and have a direct impact on their scaling journeys.
But you’re not alone. You have the support network and experience of the embedded talent company’s community to lean on, learn from, collaborate and share knowledge with every day.
In short, you can have all the impact of an in-house role, gain a breadth of experience across some incredible brand names, and have a group of brilliant, like-minded recruiters to tap into whenever you need.
Sort of sounds like having your cake and eating it, right?
Check out this interview with our Senior Principal Recruiter, Judy Haley to find out more about why recruiters love working in an embedded environment like Scede.
Set your business up for success
Let’s be very honest, without the people to build, shape and sell your shiny new software – there’s no shiny new anything.
And with that said, there’s definitely a rock-solid business case for investing in a long-term talent partner as your company scales. Someone reliable, who’s just as committed to your success as you are.
But as a Founder-funded, scaling company ourselves, we’re not here to shoe-horn you into a solution that doesn’t match your needs and fundamentally isn’t right for where you’re at in your growth journey.
Sometimes an embedded talent partner will make absolute sense – and sometimes it won’t.
If you think it makes sense for you and you’d love to supercharge hiring for your startup or scaleup, whether now or in the future, let’s have a conversation.