Fractional CHRO & HR Leadership

The gap between "no HR" and a "CHRO"

There's an awkward stretch in a company's life, roughly 20 to 200 employees, where HR is too critical to leave to whoever has capacity, yet the organization is not ready for an executive salary. The work in that stretch is genuinely senior: what to do about the manager everyone's complaining about, how to structure pay before it's a problem, whether that termination is clean, what the handbook has to say now that you've hired in a second state.

Companies usually solve it one of three ways. They give it to the office manager, who does their best with work they were never trained for. They hire an HR generalist, who handles the administration well and then has to escalate every hard call to a CEO who has no framework for it. Or they route it to employment counsel at $$$ an hour, which is excellent for the questions that are legal in nature but expensive for the ones that aren't.

Fractional HR leadership is the fourth option: an experienced HR executive engaged for a defined portion of the week, who owns the people function the way a CHRO would, and who has enough context on your business to make a judgment call rather than a generic recommendation.