Spring Data Rest - Embedded entity not deserialized on POST

I have a spring data rest project set up with Persistence entities Employer and Employee. Employee has a @ManyToOne relationship defined to Employer as follows:

@Entity
@Table(name = "EMPLOYEE")
public class Employee {
	@Id
	@GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
	private Long id;
	...
	@ManyToOne
	private Employer employer;
	...
}

This works well when I have a unit test persisting an Employee that has within it an Employer object. However, when I submit a POST request with a JSON body to my endpoint, I notice that the deserialized Employer information is null...

TRACE 16948 --- [nio-8080-exec-1] .w.s.m.m.a.ServletInvocableHandlerMethod : Arguments: [org.springframework.data.rest.webmvc.RootResourceInformation@71b498f9, Resource { content: Employee [id=1, ename=John, surname=Snow, jobTitle=Crow, companyName=Wall, companyContact=Warden of North, employeeNumber=, costCentre=, employer=null], links: [] }, org.springframework.data.rest.webmvc.PersistentEntityResourceAssembler@5e618dcb, */*]

This tells me that my Employee JSON isn't being deserialized correctly. Is there some config I need to add to get this to happen automatically, or do I need to create my own deserializer to handle this scenario?

Seeing as there's still no answer I did the workaround as discussed in the question - I created a custom deserializer.