> forward_deployed_recruiter
Traditional embedded recruiters are expensive, manual, and full-cycle. Lateral's Forward Deployed Recruiters are AI-powered, shared, and focused on one thing: delivering qualified, interested candidates to your pipeline.
The model made sense when sourcing was purely manual. It doesn't anymore.
A full-time recruiter costs $80-120K+ in salary. Fractional services like Dover charge $4-7K per hire. You're paying for a person's time — not for results.
Traditional embedded recruiters source manually, one profile at a time. No AI engine. No multi-channel search. No outreach experiments. Just a person with a LinkedIn Recruiter license.
Embedded recruiters handle everything — including scheduling, interview coordination, and offer negotiation. That's work your hiring managers and ops team already do. You're paying twice.
AI handles scale. Your FDR handles judgment. You handle decisions.
Clay sources across 20+ channels simultaneously. Every candidate enriched with verified data, work history context, and compensation signals. Lemlist drives email + LinkedIn outreach. Airtable tracks every stage. No manual Boolean strings.
Calibrates targeting based on your feedback. Manages personalized outreach. Reads career trajectories the AI can't. Ensures every candidate you see is genuinely worth your time.
Your FDR delivers qualified, interested candidates. You handle interviews, decisions, and offers. Clean handoff. No overlap with your existing team.
Clear scope. No ambiguity about who does what.
Offer acceptance rate
To reviewing interested candidates
Of agency costs. No placement fees.
AI-powered sourcing. Human judgment. Pipeline delivery. Everything upstream of your interviews — handled.
Talk to Us →A Forward Deployed Recruiter is Lateral's operating model. Your FDR handles sourcing, enrichment, outreach, and pipeline management — powered by the AI engine. Unlike traditional embedded recruiters, FDRs are a shared resource backed by platform infrastructure. They focus on pipeline delivery, not full-cycle recruiting.
Fractional recruiters (like Dover at $4-7K/hire) give you a portion of a recruiter's time. That recruiter still works manually — sourcing on LinkedIn, writing outreach by hand, tracking candidates in spreadsheets. Your FDR is backed by an AI engine that searches 20+ channels, enriches profiles automatically, and runs outreach experiments. The human judgment layer sits on top of infrastructure, not instead of it.
Yes — and that's by design. The AI engine handles the scale-intensive work, so your FDR's human judgment is concentrated where it matters most: pipeline quality and candidate delivery. This shared model is what makes Lateral dramatically less than $80-120K for a full-time recruiter.
92% of candidates who receive offers through Lateral accept them. This happens because the AI engine and your FDR focus on finding people who are genuinely interested and qualified — not just keyword matches. By the time a candidate reaches your interview stage, the interest and fit have already been validated.
3-5 business days from launch to reviewing interested, qualified candidates. The AI engine begins sourcing immediately. Your FDR manages the outreach and starts delivering candidates as they respond.