Fractional vs. Full-time Head of People: Which Does Your Startup Need?

Somewhere between 30 and 80 employees, most founders hit the same wall: the people problems have outgrown what you can handle between board meetings, but a full-time Head of People feels like a big bet. That's exactly the gap a fractional Head of People fills — and knowing which model fits your stage can save you six figures and a lot of pain.

I've been Head of People at three venture-backed startups and interim Head of People at a fourth, and now work fractionally with Seed–Series C companies. Here's the honest breakdown I give founders when they ask which way to go.

What a fractional Head of People actually is

A fractional Head of People is a senior People leader who works with your company part-time — typically one to three days a week — on an ongoing basis. Not a consultant who drops a deck and leaves: they own the function. They sit in your leadership meetings, coach your managers, build your comp bands, and make the hard calls alongside you.

Interim is the close cousin: same seniority, but focused on a gap, usually when your People leader leaves. An interim leader keeps the team steady, takes on the open work, and helps you hire the permanent leader, typically two to three days a week for a few months.

The cost math founders actually care about

A full-time Head of People in the Bay Area often runs well over $200K in base salary alone. Add benefits, equity, bonus, and the recruiter fee to find them (often 25–30% of first-year comp), and year one can easily pass $300K — before you know whether the hire is right.

A fractional engagement is a monthly retainer that scales with how much time you need. Advisory retainers start around $5,000 a month; hands-on fractional leadership typically starts around $10,000 a month. Even at $10K–$15K a month, you're spending roughly a third of the full-time cost — and you can dial it up or down as the company changes.

When fractional is the right call

Fractional tends to be the better fit when:

• You're between roughly 15 and 75 employees and the people work is real but not yet 40 hours a week of senior judgment.
• You need specific systems built — leveling, compensation, performance management, manager training — more than you need a permanent executive.
• You're heading into a defined chapter: a big hiring push, a reorg, a layoff, an acquisition, a return-to-office decision.
• You want senior judgment now but aren't ready to commit to a full-time executive search.

When to hire full-time instead

Full-time is usually right somewhere between 75 and 150 employees — sooner if you're growing very fast, are heavily distributed, or are in a regulated or high-touch industry. The signal I look for: the people work needs daily senior attention, not weekly. A good fractional leader will tell you when you've reached that point and help you run the search for their own replacement. I've done this, and it's a feature, not a conflict — the goal is a function that outlasts any one person.

What this looked like in practice

One client came to me as a growing startup of about 50 people, ready to speed up and help their own team do more. Until then, HR had been done by committee: the founders, the CFO, a recruiter, and the office manager each owned a piece, from compliance and payroll to hiring and review cycles. None of them had done HR before. It worked until it didn't. The quality was uneven, and the HR work was pulling everyone away from their real jobs.

I joined part-time. The first few months were half listening, half auditing: what did they want to hand off, and what needed fixing? We added automations and consolidated the HR tech stack, saving more than the cost of my retainer.

Over the next year, I became a real owner on the team, with quarterly goals, exec meetings, and offsites. We built an all-hands rhythm, performance cycles with manager training, and better use of the tools we already had.

Because the company is growing revenue, not headcount, I'm still with them, coaching managers and strengthening talent density by tying our people work to company OKRs. When a new round or the complexity of the role calls for a full-time Head of People, we'll design the role together, hire the right person, and I'll help them land. An executive search can cost six figures and months of time, and the search firm is gone the day your hire starts. Having someone already inside makes that handoff stick.

The milestone-based way to think about it

The cleanest way to engage fractionally is around milestones, not hours. Pick the two or three things that must be true in six months — "we have comp bands and leveling," "every manager has been trained," "we've hired 30 people without breaking culture" — and scope the engagement to those. When the milestones are done, you decide: renew for the next set, scale down to advisory, or hire full-time with a function that's already built.

That sequencing matters. Companies that hire a full-time Head of People into a blank slate often burn the first year — and the first hire — just figuring out what the function should be. A fractional leader builds the foundation first, so your eventual full-time hire walks into something that works.

The bottom line

If you're Seed to Series B and people problems are eating your week, start fractional. If you're past ~100 people and the work is daily, hire full-time — ideally into a function someone has already built. And if you're not sure which side of the line you're on, that conversation is exactly what a discovery call is for.