There’s a pattern that repeats every year in Portugal, and almost no one in recruitment pays attention to it. According to Portugal’s national statistics institute, INE, September has been the month with the most births in 14 of the last 15 years. Not an unusual year, the norm.
The explanation is simpler than it sounds. Most September babies were conceived in December, when the Christmas and New Year holidays give couples more free time. The pattern holds steady year after year.
For a recruitment team, that has a direct consequence. Initial parental leave in Portugal runs between four and six months, depending on what the parents choose. If September is when most babies arrive, it is also when most recruiters and TA leads go on leave, and the gap tends to run through to the end of the year or into the next one.
Most companies only react once the gap has already opened. At that point, finding cover is always urgent. But this is one of the few recruitment gaps that can be planned months in advance, because the calendar is, in a sense, already written.
That is exactly what Embedded Recruitment exists for, Damia’s in-house recruitment service. A Damia recruiter joins your team, works with your stack, your process, and your culture, and keeps recruitment moving even when the usual person is out. It is the same model we have used to scale technical teams at OLX Group and Wellhub, applied to a different situation, a planned absence rather than an expansion.
If someone on your recruitment team is heading into parental leave in the coming months, it is worth having the conversation sooner rather than later.
