Why some HR departments consider fractional execs when filling leadership positions

Imagine your CTO or COO steps down, who is your company gonna call? Not the Ghostbusters. But you can call a fractional exec.

Fractional executives are essentially freelance business leaders. They’re hired on a temporary basis to advise on initiatives such as product launches or restructuring plans, or to fill leadership gaps while HR searches for full-time replacements, and can be employed throughout an organization, from finance to marketing.

Freelancing as a whole is on the rise: There were 57.3 million freelancers in the US in 2017, and that number is projected to jump to 90.1 million, or over 60% of the workforce, by 2028, according to Statista. And as the rate of business transformation has increased, so has companies’ reliance on fractional execs.

“The reason why you see this taking place, finally, at the executive level, reflects the complexity and nature of disruptions that executives are dealing with,” Robert Ployhart, business administration and management professor at the University of South Carolina, told HR Brew.

The benefits. With fractional execs, companies can save on a full-time exec salary but still benefit from a high level of expertise, according to finance, HR, operations, and compliance firm PBO Advisory Group.

Another perk: They can help alleviate exhaustion in the C-suite, Ployhart said. Because fractional exec roles have an end date, they can shoulder some corporate baggage knowing they’ll walk away from it.

“It’s hard enough to run a company at [the exec] level in a more normal environment and a more stable environment,” Ployhart said. So, when you throw the rate of technological and societal change on top of the demands of the job, “it overwhelms what a person is humanly able to do.”

In the real world. Fractional work is at the heart of the business model at freelance platform A.Team. That’s why it also employs fractional execs, Raphael Ouzan, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told HR Brew.

For example, when A.Team launched a new customer experience group, Ouzan hired Jen Snow, a former CTO for the US Air Force, as a fractional CXO to consult on the initiative.

“It doesn’t get more meta” than having a fractional exec lead a group of gig workers, Ouzan said. He sees the contingent workforce only growing at every organizational level.

“These are people with [an] incredible vantage point, such a unique experience that there isn’t another person like them,” Ouzan said. “It goes way beyond the skills, it is about ways of seeing the world, and having seen certain things that most people do not see.”