A senior recruiting lead, on the days you need one.
Search and interim fill a role. This one fixes how you fill roles. Russell works inside your company as your talent acquisition lead, your talent mapper or the person who gets your hiring managers to hire, on the days and for the weeks the job takes and no longer.
For companies that want to hire better, not just more.
Sometimes the trigger is volume: a biotech that has closed a round and needs twenty people in a year without a talent acquisition team, or a site coming out of a hiring freeze with thirty open requisitions. More often it is quality: time-to-hire that has crept past four months, cost per hire that nobody has added up, new starters who leave inside a year, hiring managers running interviews on instinct, and no picture of who is out there before a role opens.
Embedded work is for the second group as much as the first. It brings twenty years of recruiting, fifteen of them in European life sciences, inside your business to fix the process, not just to fill the seats: talent mapping before the vacancy, a TA strategy that matches the business plan, hiring managers who can interview, suppliers under control, and the numbers to prove it improved. Paying an agency per hire does not fix any of that, and a full-time TA lead is the slow answer to a problem that may last a year.
Russell spent two years inside a fast-growing biologics manufacturer as its embedded talent lead, delivering more than 150 hires at an average time-to-fill under 36 days. The engagement described here is that role, offered part-time.
In the client’s words.
Exclusive recruitment partner through a period of growth and the build of a manufacturing plant, launched in early 2025.
- 150+ hires across all departments
- Average time-to-fill under 36 days
“Over the past three years, [Russell’s team] has been our exclusive recruitment partner, successfully filling over 150 positions with top-tier talent at competitive rates. Their flexibility and drive have been instrumental in their success, always taking the time to understand our unique needs. Whether we needed specialized roles filled quickly or sought long-term strategic hires, [they] consistently delivered high-quality candidates who seamlessly fit our organizational culture. We highly recommend them as a dedicated and professional recruitment partner.”
Pick the pieces you need.
Engagements are built from these. Most start with one and grow.
Talent mapping
Who holds the roles you will need in the next two years, where they sit, what they earn and who would move. A map you own, built before the vacancy exists, so the search takes weeks instead of months.
Fractional recruiter or TA manager
Russell runs your requisitions on the days you need him: sourcing, screening, hiring-manager briefings, interview coordination, offers. Your ATS, your employer brand, your headcount; a fixed monthly fee covering the agreed hiring volume, with additional hires charged at a reduced fee.
Talent acquisition strategy
Which roles to search for, which to advertise, which to fill with interims, which to build internally. A hiring plan that matches the business plan, with the budget and the sequencing to make it real.
Employer branding, without the agency
What candidates in Dutch life sciences actually hear about you, and what to do about it: the careers page, the job texts, the LinkedIn presence, the way your hiring managers come across in a first interview.
Sourcing team: build, lead or upgrade
Setting up an in-house sourcing function, leading an existing team or coaching your recruiters in direct candidate sourcing. Where additional delivery capacity is needed, Russell can also arrange experienced sourcing support, with the scope, responsibilities and cost agreed in advance.
Time-to-hire
Where the weeks go: approval loops, interview scheduling, indecisive panels, offers that arrive after the candidate has accepted elsewhere. Russell measures it, removes the blockers and leaves you with a process that holds.
The next hire
Advice on a single critical role before you open it: level, scope, salary, whether it should be one role or two, and whether the market will give you what the org chart wants.
Hiring-manager capability
Structured interviewing, scorecards, decision meetings that decide. Short, practical sessions for the people who actually make the hires, with Russell in the room for the first few.
Agency and cost management
Which agencies to keep, on what terms, for which roles; a preferred-supplier setup that stops the CV flood and cuts the spend, with a specialist watching the specialists.
Diagnose, embed, hand over.
Diagnostic
Two weeks inside the business: open roles, pipeline, process, tooling, hiring managers, agency spend, employer brand as candidates see it. You get a written picture of where the time and money go and a proposed engagement, with the days per week and the duration it needs. If the honest answer is that you need one search rather than a talent partner, you hear that instead.
Embedded, part-time
The shape is set at intake and follows the work: a day a week for a year to keep a hiring plan on track, or three days a week for three weeks to clear a backlog before a site opens. On site as much as the work needs. Russell works under your name, in your systems, alongside your managers. Monthly, you see the numbers: roles opened, filled, time-to-fill, source of hire, agency spend avoided.
Handover
The point of the engagement is that it ends. The map, the process, the scorecards and the supplier setup stay with you, and if you need an in-house TA lead by then, Russell will have helped you hire them.
A fixed monthly fee, agreed volume.
Embedded work is priced as a fixed monthly fee covering the agreed hiring volume, with additional hires charged at a reduced fee. The days and the volume are set together at intake, so the model stays fair in both directions: the agreed volume is covered by the monthly fee, and a month with more hires than agreed is priced as set at intake. Advisory pieces with a defined end, such as a talent map, a TA strategy or the next-hire question, are priced as a project: one figure, one deliverable, one date.
Whichever shape fits, it is settled at intake, in writing, before anyone starts; there are no surprise invoices. Where a role needs a retained search, executive or otherwise, that is a separate conversation with a separate agreement, and Russell will say so before, not after.
Engagements are contracted through Axeleon B.V. and can start within a few weeks of the diagnostic. Days per week and duration are designed at intake, not fixed in advance; the only rule is that they match the job.
Tell us what hiring looks like from where you sit.
Thirty minutes with Russell. You'll leave with a view on whether the problem is one role, a run of roles, or the way roles get filled, and what each would take.