What is Fractional HR?

Your company has 120 people. A founding team stretched thin. A team lead who is handling HR decisions because there is no one else. And a growth plan that assumes headcount doubling in the next 18 months.

You know you need proper HR leadership. But a full-time VP People costs €120–180k per year, and you are not ready for that investment yet.

That is the moment Fractional HR tends to make sense.

What Fractional HR actually is

Fractional HR is part-time, embedded HR leadership at a senior level.

A fractional HR leader works inside your company. In leadership meetings, with your managers, alongside your founding team. They bring the thinking and operating capacity of a senior HR executive, without the full-time salary.

The scope depends on what you need. It can be building people processes from scratch, managing a leadership hire, leading a restructuring, stabilising a team through fast growth, or being the thinking partner your CEO needs on people decisions.

When it fits

Fractional HR tends to work well when a company is in one of these situations:

You are between 75 and 250 people and your people function is behind your growth rate. You raised a round and know you need to scale headcount fast — but need the right structure first. Your HR lead resigned and you need leadership-level coverage while you hire a replacement. You are preparing for an exit and want your people function to hold up under due diligence.

The common thread: there is a real need for senior HR thinking and execution, but a full-time hire does not yet make financial or strategic sense.

What it produces

The outcomes depend on the mandate. In practice, Fractional HR at this stage tends to address recruiting that keeps pace with headcount plans, manager capability so team leads can actually lead, compensation structure that survives a funding round, onboarding that does not rely on the founders, and a people roadmap aligned to business goals.

These are not deliverables in the project-management sense. They are what the company looks like six months after the engagement starts.

What to look for

The most important factor: operational experience inside companies at your stage.

Someone who has only worked in large corporations will not know what it is like to build from scratch at 100 people. A generalist who has never been embedded in a scale-up will not understand the founder dynamics.

Look for someone who has been inside the phases you are about to go through — fast hiring, team structure changes, leadership transitions — and ideally in a sector that shares your context. The language of a tech scale-up is different from the language of a professional services firm.

The second thing: they should work embedded, with operational accountability. If the engagement is primarily advisory, it is consulting — not Fractional HR.

A note on terminology

Fractional HR goes by different names: Interim HR, HR consulting, Part-time CHRO. The terms overlap. What matters more than the label is the structure of the engagement: embedded, senior, with ownership of outcomes.

If someone is telling you what to do but not doing it with you, that is a different engagement.

If your company is at the point where people decisions are slowing growth and there is no one with the seniority and capacity to lead them, that is worth 30 minutes.

Book a 30 min call