How PE Firms Can Build a Scalable Talent Acquisition Model Across Their Portfolio

Private equity firms and their portfolio companies are dealing with a familiar hiring problem.

Growth does not happen in a neat, predictable line.

Sometimes hiring is urgent. Sometimes it slows down. Sometimes a portco needs to build out an engineering team. Then turn around and hire sales, marketing, finance, HR, and operations leaders. And doing that with a one-off search model every time can get expensive, inconsistent, and messy fast.

In this episode of Stacked, Mark sits down with Phil Muldoon to talk about how Hirewell is partnering with private equity firms and their portcos to build more scalable, flexible talent acquisition models.

The old approach was usually pretty simple. A portfolio company needed to fill one role, so they brought in a search partner. Or they hired an in-house talent partner. Maybe it worked. But either way, once the search was done, there was not much left behind.

No reusable process.

No standardized playbook.

No broader portfolio strategy.

That is where the market has shifted.

PE firms are increasingly looking for partners who can support hiring across multiple portcos, without building out large, internal teams. That means helping with more than candidate sourcing. It means building scorecards, improving ATS workflows, creating repeatable interview processes, and making sure each hiring team has a better framework for the next role, not just the current one.

As Phil explains in the episode, the short-term win is finding the right hire. The long-term win is building a talent acquisition process that can keep producing the right hires over the next 12 to 24 months.

That distinction matters.

For high-growth companies, hiring needs change quickly. A portco may need to push hard for six months, pause while new employees ramp up, then scale again. A traditional full-time recruiting model can be too rigid for that. A single-search model can be too fragmented.

That is why Hirewell’s recruiting-as-a-service approach is built around flexibility.

The model gives companies one consistent engagement leader, specialized delivery leads, and access to recruiting teams across technology, go-to-market, finance and accounting, HR, manufacturing and logistics, and real estate. Instead of treating every role like a brand-new relationship, companies get a consistent hiring partner with specialists who actually understand the function they are recruiting for.

That specialization is a big part of the value.

Phil puts it plainly: recruiters need to speak the language of the candidates they are talking to. A recruiter working with accountants should understand accounting. A recruiter working with engineers should understand tech. Otherwise, candidates can tell immediately that something is off.

And in a competitive hiring market, credibility matters.

The episode also digs into cost structure and why flexible recruiting models can make more sense for PE-backed companies. Instead of carrying a full-time recruiter during periods when hiring is slow, companies can maintain access to a broader recruiting team through a lower monthly engagement fee, then pay a discounted success fee when hires are made.

The point is not just cost savings. It is confidence.

For PE-backed companies, especially in consulting or service-heavy businesses, growth often depends on selling work before the full team is already in place. That can be risky if there is no talent pipeline behind the sale.

But when companies know they have a scalable recruiting partner ready, they can sell with more confidence. They know that when demand hits, the hiring engine is already there.

That is the real conversation in this episode.

Not just how to fill jobs.

How to build a hiring model that supports growth without forcing companies to choose between overbuilding internally or scrambling externally every time a new role opens.

For PE firms and portcos, that is the opportunity: stop treating recruiting like a series of disconnected searches and start treating it like infrastructure.

Click here to listen to the full episode on Hirewell: https://talentinsights.hirewell.com/

Mark Slocum