Most organisations know how to hire five people. The challenge starts when they need to hire fifty, particularly when a business transformation, digital rollout, new market launch or mission-critical project turns a handful of vacancies into a business-critical hiring programme involving multiple teams, specialist skill sets and competing deadlines.
Many organisations underestimate what happens next. Identifying specialist talent is rarely the hardest part - building a hiring process that can keep pace with programme delivery is.
Across the specialist technology markets we support, we've seen the same pattern repeatedly. Hiring plans are built around headcount targets, but the operational work required to deliver those targets often receives far less attention. Recruitment doesn't become more difficult as programmes grow - it becomes more operational.
What Does It Actually Take to Deliver 100 Hires?
Hiring one hundred people sounds straightforward when it's reduced to a headcount target. The work behind that number looks very different.
Based on Empiric's delivery modelling, a programme of this size typically involves around 1,313 CV submissions, 875 interviews, 125 offers and more than 10,000 talent conversations.
The hiring target is only one part of the workload. Behind it sits interview scheduling, stakeholder management, offer approvals and candidate communication stretching over months rather than weeks. Recruitment stops being a series of individual vacancies and becomes a delivery workstream with timelines, reporting, ownership and measurable milestones.
"Everyone talks about hiring fifty people. Hardly anyone talks about what it actually takes to hire fifty people. That's usually where programmes start running into trouble."
Kyle Kuhn | Head of New York | nCino, SAP & Salesforce Practice
Why Do Large Hiring Programmes Slow Down?
Technology hiring is usually framed as a talent shortage. On most large programmes, the shortage isn't what stalls delivery - the hiring process is.
Go back to those numbers. Hundreds of interviews and thousands of candidate conversations have to be coordinated while the programme itself continues moving forward. Interview capacity stretches, feedback takes longer, candidate communication becomes inconsistent and hiring managers become overloaded. The strongest candidates, often already involved in several interview processes, accept other offers before decisions are made.
This is particularly visible across the specialist markets that the Empiric teams work across, where experienced professionals rarely stay available for long.
Does Adding More Agencies Solve the Problem?
For many organisations, the first response is to add more suppliers to the PSL. Sometimes that helps in the short term. Just as often, it introduces another layer of complexity. Different agencies tell different stories about the same opportunity, candidate duplication increases and hiring managers spend more time coordinating suppliers than interviewing candidates. Recruitment becomes harder to manage at exactly the point consistency matters most.
The organisations delivering large hiring programmes most successfully usually simplify recruitment rather than add more moving parts.
How Does Embedded Recruitment Work?
Once hiring starts to outgrow internal capacity, most organisations have three options. They can ask their existing recruitment team to absorb the additional workload, appoint more recruitment suppliers or bring in dedicated recruitment capacity that works alongside the internal talent function.
That's where embedded recruitment fits - rather than outsourcing recruitment entirely or expanding a PSL indefinitely, an embedded team becomes part of the hiring programme itself. The focus shifts from filling individual vacancies to managing delivery as a whole as an embedded team becomes part of the hiring operation itself, supporting strategic workforce planning and taking ownership of the recruitment process from initial briefing through to onboarding.
We've developed Empiric Embedded around the specialist technology markets we already support. Dedicated recruiter capacity sits alongside market intelligence, established talent communities and a fixed-cost delivery model designed to scale with demand rather than individual placements. This is much stronger because it explains the substance of the service rather than just its position between agency and RPO.
When Should You Use Embedded Recruitment?
Embedded recruitment isn't designed to replace traditional recruitment. Many hiring requirements are still best served through contingent recruitment, particularly when organisations are filling individual specialist roles or making occasional strategic hires. An embedded model starts to make sense when hiring becomes business-critical over a sustained period and the existing hiring model can no longer provide the capacity, consistency or control required.
That can happen during major transformation and growth initiatives, digital expansion, mission-critical delivery or entry into new markets. In each case, sourcing is only one part of the job. A dedicated embedded team can help reduce time-to-hire and bring more consistency to briefing, interviewing, assessment, technology use and candidate communication, while giving hiring teams better visibility over activity and where delays are building.
It can also bring more informed diversity and inclusion practices into the hiring process. Through initiatives such as our social enterprise Next Tech Girls, Empiric has practical experience helping employers widen access to technology careers and engage talent that traditional hiring routes frequently miss. That experience can also shape how embedded teams approach attraction, assessment and candidate experience more broadly.
"Finding specialist talent is difficult. Keeping a large hiring programme moving week after week is even harder. That's usually where projects lose momentum."
Justin Reid | Partner | Mission Critical Talent
What Changes When Hiring Becomes Business-Critical?
Regardless of the specific hiring programme, the pattern is remarkably consistent. Hiring targets are usually agreed long before anyone works out what delivering them will actually involve and, while sourcing talent is only part of the challenge, keeping interviews moving, securing timely feedback, coordinating stakeholders and maintaining candidate momentum over several months is where programmes begin to lose pace.
Traditional recruitment remains the right approach for many organisations. Others reach a point where hiring becomes an operational workstream in its own right, requiring a different level of planning, visibility and delivery support.
"Most organisations don't set out looking for embedded recruitment. They reach a point where hiring has become critical to programme delivery and realise the operating model they've always used isn't built for that kind of scale. That's the gap Embedded is designed to fill."
Omer Saadet | Managing Director
Want to Understand What Your Hiring Plan Really Involves?
One of the biggest themes in this article is that hiring targets rarely reflect the delivery effort required behind them.
That's why we've built the Empiric Embedded Hiring Capacity Calculator. It models the interview volume, candidate pipeline and recruiter capacity needed to deliver a hiring target, giving hiring teams a practical way to stress-test their plans before recruitment begins.
Whether you're planning twenty hires or two hundred, it provides a clearer picture of the operational effort required to keep delivery on track.
Try the Hiring Capacity Calculator.
Final Thoughts
Large technology programmes change the nature of recruitment itself. As hiring scales, success depends less on filling individual vacancies and more on coordinating a delivery function capable of keeping pace with the business. The organisations that keep hiring moving recognise that early and build recruitment into planning from the outset rather than treating it as an operational challenge to solve later.
If you're planning a large technology transformation, reviewing how your organisation approaches hiring at scale or simply want to understand whether an embedded delivery model is the right fit, we'd be happy to share what we're seeing across the specialist technology markets we support.
Learn more about Empiric Embedded, explore our specialist technology practices or speak to the team about whether an embedded hiring model could support your next technology programme.
