How we work has changed monumentally. Traditional employment paradigms are giving way to new ways of hiring, working, building teams, and scaling companies. Among the emerging trends is the concept of fractional roles - this is gaining traction for startups, particularly scaling and growth stage startups in the pre-Series A- Series B phase of growth.

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A fractional executive is an accomplished C-suite expert usually with around two decades of experience in a specific domain. They have opted out of being full-time senior executives with one single company and have positioned themselves and companies now engage fractional executives to temporarily assume vital roles, achieving an optimal balance between time and expenditure.

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When exactly does a company look for high-level fractional talent?

There are many phases in a company’s journey when they need high-level talent such as CMOs, CROs, CPOs, or CHROs for specific projects and tasks for a prolonged period of time. They won’t need them for a full-time position, but they need their pin-pointed expertise and know-how for period-specific tasks such as launching a product in new markets; identifying a hiring and salary structure for a growing team or building up a sales funnel and putting cadences and metrics around it. These are not tasks junior-level professionals can do and these experienced individuals have playbooks, frameworks, proven success, and domain-relevant experience that they can execute in real-time.

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For companies and startups, embracing fractional talent comes with massive benefits such as accessing elite talent without long-term financial commitments. It also effectively curbs overhead expenses typically associated with permanent staff members—such as benefits, training, and office infrastructure costs. This model is particularly advantageous for small businesses and startups that have limited resources but need high-level expertise at crucial growth points in their journey.

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In an era focused on flexibility, innovation, diversity, and adaptability, fractional roles emerge as a potent solution that caters to the demands of contemporary work dynamics.

There is also increasing access to high-level talent due to post-pandemic lifestyle options and the recent downsizing of companies. All these factors have created the perfect storm for companies to access top talent easily, quickly, and effectively with the help of streamlined intelligent platforms such as Wizly - here, individuals are vetted and checked before onboarding and being recommended to companies.

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Gene Yu is the founder and CEO of Blackpanda of Blackpanda Group, a cyber security firm focused on delivering digital forensics and incident response services to the region. They are in the growth and expansion phase and need access to talent and help for various departments.

For companies, bringing a fractional talent on board allows for a disproportionate impact relative to the budget, and for the full-time team to benefit from an experienced colleague to help them work through specific challenges or areas of focus.

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For fractional talent, the benefits are plenty. They get opportunities for thoughtful work engagements that fit their unique circumstances, talents, and working styles, enabling a more productive and fulfilled work life.

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‍Lisa Schneider, a New York-based fractional CPO says one of the reasons fractional work is so rewarding is that you get to have close eyes on various projects in various categories.

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“This is great for your own learning and growth mindset as well as for cross-pollinating ideas across categories. It’s also super rewarding to be able to provide a faster path to outcomes and see results in progress,” she says.

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Lisa helps founders and CEOs identify the right things to build to align with business goals, provide frameworks for prioritization and cross-functional alignment, build outcome-based roadmaps, and streamline teams and processes to deliver faster and leverages on platforms such as Wizly to meet other independents, build her network and grow her portfolio of clients.

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The growth of the gig economy across various market sectors, is driven by valid justifications of remote work, lifestyle and living in the digital age. In the United States alone, the number of gig workers surged by 33% between 2010 and 2020, as indicated by a Bureau of Labor Statistics report. 1.57 billion people in the world are freelancers, which is almost 47% of the global workforce.

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This article was written by Puja Bhawani, co-founder & CMO of Wizly, a smart growth platform that connects growing companies with the right APAC growth talent, information & resources, and collaboration tools to accelerate problem-solving across growth domains including Go-To-Market, Sales, Product, Market Expansion and more. Our mission is to fuel intentional and rapid growth.