In recent years, fractional hiring has become an emerging trend for growing companies in desperate need of a stress load reduction on their executives. Money and time are a high commodity for rising firms, and that’s where fractional hiring comes to assistance.
Experience and guidance are crucial to companies, which they can gain by retaining fractional hires. Fractional employment can ease the transitional stage of an expansion or a major integration. So, let’s see what it is and why it might be what you are looking for.
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What Is Fractional Hiring?
The keyword is fractional, as it refers to an act of hiring an employee for a fraction of the regular working hours. We can trace its origins to financial institutions and academia, as the fractional employees usually divided their workweek among multiple employers. For example, a professor teaches classes for two days at one faculty and three days at another.
So how does fractional hiring differ from a traditional part-time job? A part-time has a fluctuating schedule that depends on the demands of the profession. On the other hand, a fractional hire is at a company’s disposal only on certain days of the week, meaning working hours are clearly defined.
Even though some fractional employees work full five days a week, the majority prefer a flexible life-work schedule. This is the case for people in the semi-retirement stage of their careers, for example.
Fractional employment is not classified as freelance work either, as it is not tied to a single project. It has a classical employee/employer relationship. They form strong bonds with the company and learn the ins and outs of the firm’s mission.
More often than not, fractional employees relinquish medical and dental benefits. It is a direct consequence of them being classified as contractors. People generally elect for fractional employment as a way of supplementing their income and building their resume.
Most fractional hires consider that fractional employment brings a lot of variety to their life, and makes the work experience much more thrilling. Some choose it as it allows them the opportunity to work in different cultures, which gains them unique working experience.
The Benefits of Fractional Hiring
We’ve seen the perks of fractional employment from the employee’s perspective, now we will see what benefits it brings to an employer.
The profession that best describes the benefits of fractional hiring is an executive position, which we will use as an example. Companies have a strong tendency to overburden existing executives as a cost-cutting measure, resulting in job abandonment. Executives possess a rare combination of experience and skills, so retaining them is important for a rising startup.
The top executives value their time highly, and without a significant investment, hiring one full-time is not always an option for a startup. Hiring an interim manager brings four primary benefits to the table.
#1 Seasoned Veterans
Most fractionals executives have experience working full-time and have found themselves in situations unfamiliar to most founders. A fractional CxO has at least 10 or 20 years of service in the industry. A good majority of them have worked in multiple C-level roles and most of the time across various trades. Some have even run their businesses, which they built from scratch.
All this results in a broader understanding of cross-functional intricacies and comprehensive vertical knowledge. The importance of it cannot be understated. It makes or breaks the prosperity of a company. Juggling multiple businesses, rapid problem-solving of overlapping issues, etc., is what they are known for.
#2 Progress Motivated
The nature of an executive role is an on-the-go lifestyle, which demands staying ahead of the curve. Fractional executives are professionals with a gift for learning and a strong desire for professional development.
Their cross-industry expertise, combined with access to the latest technology, makes them a valuable asset for a rising establishment. To become a successful executive, one must integrate self-management skills, domain skills, and transferable skills efficiently.
Fractional executives make the best use of their transferable leadership to achieve success upon switching to another industry. They are visionaries who have built effective teams and worked in uncertain, ambiguous, and complex business environments. Cross-industry experience helps a fractional manager think from multiple perspectives and promotes out-of-the-box thinking.
#3 Result Driven
Delivering fast and tangible results are the primary focal points of fractional executives. Unlike their permanent colleagues, they are hired for a short amount of time. Working in these short stints requires impact mapping and radical focus to tackle demanding issues of the profession.
A fundamental objective of fractional executives is to focus on the company’s urgent priorities and implementing efficient steps that lead to success. It requires talking to everyone in the company, all hierarchal levels included, so that fractionals executives can obtain an in-depth understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
An often-overlooked skill of a fractional manager is the serving of cold and harsh truths to the board. Conventional executives, more often than not, have a hard time admitting them.
It is a result of office politics that have no place in a growing startup. Due to their no-nonsense approach to goals, fractional executives are unbiased, candid, and goal-driven.
#4 Exactly What a Scaling Startup Needs
As skilled as they can be, startups face seemingly impossible odds and eventually reach a point of stagnation in their growth. It is a frequent case that they don’t even realize the magnitude of the situation they’re dealing with. The risks are just too enormous to overlook, meaning there is no room for a scattershot approach to growth.
A fractional executive is exactly what a startup needs in this situation. It’s a win-win situation and too sweet to ignore. The gig economy offers flexibility and independence to the fractional executive. On the other side, the startup obtains the vast experience of a seasoned executive without sacrificing noticeable amounts of their bottom line and equity.
Startups often don’t require all of the roles of a full-time executive on a regular basis. What they seek is a supporting role during critical time intervals of a growth or a restructuring phase.
In the end, most startups will opt for recruiting in-house, full-time executive leadership teams during the latter stages of their life. On the other hand, we consider fractional CxO staffing a perfect option to bridge the existing gap between the startup’s dire need for support and its resources.
The concept of fractional hiring allows small businesses great leadership at the fraction of the cost, pun intended.
Why BroutonLab Is the Best Resource for Fractional Hiring?
Fractional hiring is not purely limited to executive roles, and it has breached into the IT sector a while ago. In the current world of data science, it’s easy to get lost. That’s why at BroutonLab, where data science consulting has helped numerous startups get off their feet, we introduced fractional hiring.
The common dilemma for startups is the choice between the quality of the product and hiring talent. With the concept of fractional hiring, your data science projects will be in the professional hands of our data science teams.
While working as an extension of your team, we offer complete transparency with a flexible and scalable model. We are confident it will meet all the requirements of your projects, reducing time lost and optimizing your processes.
Starting from 10 hours per week, we work in sprints with tangible results for you to test weekly. Startups go through different growth stages, and we take it as our mission to find the proper working relationship with our fractional hires and you.
Final Words
As an emerging trend, fractional hiring has shown its immense potential to ease the transition phases of business, predominantly startups. Startups often work on a constricted budget, making them a prime target for fractional employment.
The fractional hires work a portion of the full-time hours, with a strict working schedule. The amount of work doesn’t fluctuate for fractional employees, and they are not hired for a single project. These traits are crucial in separating them from part-time and freelance classifications, respectively.
Fractional employees cite flexibility, the opportunity to work in multiple environments, and improved work-life balance as the primary catalysts in choosing fractional employment.
We’ve discussed the benefits of fractional employment on an example of a fractional executive. In essence, most fractional managers are seasoned veterans, progress motivated, and result-driven individuals perfect for a startup environment.
Startups at their transitional stages lack proper funding for skillful talent. This is intensified for most small businesses seeking data scientists. Via fractional hiring, BroutonLab looks to offer a helping hand for startups in need of professional data science teams.
Experience and professionalism for data science have never been so available, at only a fraction of the cost!
About Carson Derrow
