VERMELO | EMBEDDED RECRUITMENT FOR INSURANCE COMPANIES
EMBEDDED RECRUITERS WHO KNOW THE INSURANCE MARKET
Recruiters who already know the market, working inside your team from the first week. Switch them on when hiring picks up. Switch them off when it settles
An insurance maths problem
Your talent team is usually two or three people. Your hiring plan says forty roles this year, half of them pricing, actuarial or underwriting. The agencies on your PSL will fill them, eventually, at a fee that would fund another recruiter for six months.
Adding permanent headcount to TA is a hard sell when the board wants cost out, not in. So the roles drift, the hiring managers go round the process to their favourite agency, and the fees climb anyway.
Embedded recruitment fixes the maths. You get experienced insurance recruiters inside your team for as long as you need them, on a monthly subscription rather than a per-placement fee. When the surge passes, they go. No redundancy, no agency invoice, no drama.
How it works at an insurer
An embedded recruiter from Vermelo is not a contractor with a laptop and a LinkedIn Recruiter licence. They arrive with the market knowledge, the tooling and the candidate networks already in place, and then they become part of your business.
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01
They work under your brand
Your careers page, your email address, your interview process. Candidates hear from you, not from an agency.
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02
They work in your systems
Your ATS, your HRIS, your Teams channels. Your data stays your data.
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03
They bring their own sourcing tools
Premium job boards, search licences and market data are covered by us. You are not asked to buy subscriptions.
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04
They report to you
Weekly pipeline, time to hire, source of hire, offer acceptance. The numbers your CFO actually asks about.
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05
They flex
One recruiter for three months, three recruiters for a year, a pricing specialist for a single build-out. The model bends to the hiring plan, not the other way round.
The roles insurers bring to us
If the plan is heavy on pricing and actuarial, we can say a few things with confidence: the market is thin, the good candidates are not applying to adverts, and a generalist recruiter will spend the first month working out what a GLM is. Ours will not.
Embedded, agency or RPO?
Most Heads of Talent we speak to are choosing between three models. Here is our breakdown:
| Recruitment agency | Embedded recruitment Vermelo | RPO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Percentage of salary, per placement | Fixed monthly subscription | Programme fee, usually annual |
| Whose brand | Theirs | Yours | Yours |
| Where they sit | Outside, working several clients at once | Inside your team, dedicated to you | Inside, running the whole function |
| Good for | One-off hard-to-fill roles | Surges, freezes, projects, cutting agency spend | Sustained volume, full process ownership |
| Commitment | None, until the invoice | Monthly subscription or fixed term project | Multi-year |
| Time to get going | Immediate | Days to weeks (depending on scope) | Weeks to months |
Embedded is the middle path: more control than an agency, less commitment than an RPO. And if the hiring plan turns out to be permanent rather than a spike, it converts into an RPO without starting again.
Comparing providers? See the top embedded recruitment providers in the UK, including where we sit and if you're weighing providers, our guide to which embedded recruitment provider fits which situation puts regulated hiring in context.
Regulated hiring, without the drag
As with other regulated business, insurers do not get to skip the checks. Referencing, right to work, credit and criminal record screening, regulatory references for certified roles. Done badly, these can add weeks to every start date and lose candidates to competitors who move faster.
Our recruiters work in this sector every day, turning around checks in days not weeks. The checks are built into the process from the offer stage, not bolted on at the end and you are kept informed throughout the whole process.
Scaling an insurance business? Here are the hiring bottlenecks nobody models until the FCA asks.
When embedded is the right call
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A transformation programme has landed 25 roles on a TA team built for 10.
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A headcount freeze means you cannot hire a recruiter but still have to hire everyone else.
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Recruitment agency spend is stacking up and someone senior in finance has noticed.
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You are integrating an acquisition and two hiring processes have become no hiring process.
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You are launching a new product line or entering a new market and need a specialist pipeline built from nothing.
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Your best hiring managers are quietly using agencies off-PSL because the queue is too long.
And you will know it is not the right call if you have one hard role to fill this quarter. For that, use a good agency. We will tell you so.
Embedded is one part of an insurance talent engine; here's the whole engine.
Why Vermelo
We are talent solutions specialists working almost entirely with regulated business - insurance, insurtech, fintech and financial services. We were named Best Recruitment Process Outsourcing Business at the Global Recruiter Awards 2025. We are part of the GWV group, alongside Gerrard White, a specialist insurance recruiter working across the UK, Europe and the US, which means our embedded recruiters draw on a market network most standalone embedded providers cannot match.
Embedded recruitment for insurers, answered
Cost, speed, systems, and how it compares to a contract recruiter or an RPO.
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Embedded recruitment places experienced recruiters inside your business for a fixed period, working under your brand and in your systems, paid as a monthly subscription rather than per placement. It is also called Recruiter as a Service (RaaS) or embedded talent.
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Embedded recruitment from Vermelo is priced as a monthly subscription, not a fee per hire. The price depends on how many recruiters you need and at what level, how long you need them for, and the seniority of the roles they will be working on. One recruiter for a three-month claims surge costs less than a senior pricing specialist embedded for a year. Tell us the hiring plan and we will give you a quote.
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This fully depends on the scope of the work, we can usually be up and running in a matter of days.
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Yes. That is the point. Candidates see your brand throughout, and every record sits in your system, so nothing walks out of the door when the engagement ends.
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A contract recruiter is an individual you find, vet, manage and pay a day rate to, with their own tools or none. An embedded recruiter comes with Vermelo's sourcing tools, market data, back-up cover and account management, and a delivery commitment that sits with us rather than with one person.
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Yes. Several clients start with one or two embedded recruiters and move to a full RPO once hiring volumes become predictable. The process, data and relationships carry across.
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No. Most of our clients have between 50 and 5,000 employees. Enterprise-scale RPOs are built for the FTSE 100. We are built for everyone underneath.