Hi, I am Inês. I am a tech recruiter at Damia, and for the last nine months I have been on an Embedded Recruitment placement at Logicalis Portugal.
Damia offers Embedded Recruitment (known industry-wide as RPO) as one of our two core services, alongside Permanent Recruitment. It is a way for our clients to scale their hiring quickly and thoughtfully, with a Damia recruiter working from inside their team.
Embedded Recruitment is a partnership at close range. The client’s goals become ours. The way a company attracts, recruits and retains talent shapes its ability to grow, and when the model is working, the embedded recruiter is part of that engine, not a supplier next to it.
How I ended up in embedded work
Almost three years ago, I changed direction and started working in HR, specifically in IT recruitment. My first two years covered a wide range of tech profiles across different clients, with a heavier focus on software roles. That variety gave me a strong foundation.
By late last year, I could feel it was time for a next step. Damia offered me one: an embedded placement with a new client, Logicalis Portugal.
I said yes almost immediately, because the placement offered exactly what I was looking for. A single client to focus on. A seat inside the internal HR team. Involvement across the whole process, from first conversation through technical interviews, meetings with department directors to understand their needs, all the way to the final offer.
The reality of the placement
I want to be honest about what the assignment actually looked like on day one.
Logicalis was scaling its Portuguese team through a period where the internal HR function itself was being restructured. The company had not previously run parallel hires across several different profile types, and they were committed to Portugal as a growth market. That combination, ambition plus reorganisation, is a real thing to walk into as an outside recruiter joining an in-house team.
A second wrinkle: most of the roles I ended up hiring for were hardware profiles, not the software ones I had spent my first two years on. For some of those role types, it was the first time they had been hired in that HR setup at all.
None of it was a bad thing. It was just a challenge, and it was the reason I said yes in the first place.
What nine months taught me
By the end of my placement, five lessons stood out:
- Managing expectations between the company and the candidate is a real skill, and it is where a good recruiter earns their weight
- Communication and open sharing are what make a team function under pressure
- Giving your opinion is part of the job when you can see something the team might not, even when you are the outsider
- Spotting problems is easier than proposing solutions, and the second is where the value sits
- Change takes time, especially in a company that is scaling and restructuring at the same time. Trusting the direction matters as much as pushing on it
Every one of these is a Logicalis lesson specifically, and every one is portable to whatever embedded placement I take on next.
Not alone: Damia’s role during the placement
One thing worth naming, because it does not happen automatically in the RPO market: throughout my nine months at Logicalis, Damia stayed close. Regular check-ins. Support when I hit a wall. Someone to celebrate the small and large wins with. That is the difference between a Damia embedded placement and simply being seconded to a client, and it was one of the reasons the assignment worked.
What comes next
We are the sum of the people we cross paths with, the experiences we take on, and the challenges we work through. Nine months at Logicalis has made me a more rounded recruiter than I was going in. What comes next, I do not know exactly, but I know how to absorb what each new placement teaches, and I know that the right people around you make the path shorter, even when it is not a straight line.
Curious about how Embedded Recruitment works at Damia? See the service page, or browse our current tech roles.
