Your talent strategy needs to align with your budget, workload, and business goals, but also adapt as your company and its operations evolve. When filling key positions at different growth stages, one of the critical questions to consider is full-time or fractional?
Your strategy should be pragmatic and timely, focused on today’s operational needs of the organization, not yesterday’s org charts or headcounts. For some companies a full-time hire is essential to maintain stability and momentum in a competitive market. For other organizations, it’s about remaining agile, nimble, and resilient in an ever-changing economic environment. In those cases, fractional talent may be the appropriate solution.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. The right approach depends on myriad factors. Both full-time and fractional hires offer unique advantages—and understanding these can help companies make smart, forward-thinking talent decisions.
Click here to download a hands-on worksheet to help companies assess their full-time vs factional talent needs.
The Case for Full-Time Talent
Full-time hires bring consistency, commitment, and cultural alignment. These individuals often become core members of the executive team, contributing not just their expertise but also to the company’s long-term strategic vision.
Key advantages of full-time hires include:
- Deep Organizational Integration: Full-time employees have the opportunity to embed themselves deep within the organization’s operations and culture, facilitating trust-building and collaborative synergy across teams.
- Built for the Long Game: They are equipped to develop and execute on longer-term strategies, seeing initiatives through from conception to completion.
- Developing Internal Leaders: Investing in full-time leaders supports succession planning and the cultivation of future leaders within the organization.
- Availability and Bandwidth: Full-time leaders are fully engaged and available, offering the responsiveness necessary as organizations scale.
Full-time hires tend to be the right choice for those positions where consistent long-term leadership and institutional memory are critical.
The Appeal of Fractional Talent
Fractional leaders are often ideal for interim, project-based, and highly specialized roles as well as for positions where the workload is less than full-time. For example, small but growing enterprises may reach the point in their evolution where they have sufficient responsibilities to bring on a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) or Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) two or three days a week. This solution provides companies with targeted expertise without the commitment and cost of a full-time hire and is particularly attractive for startups, emerging biotech firms, and companies navigating transitional phases.
Benefits of fractional talent include:
- Cost Efficiency: Companies gain access to experienced leadership at an approximately 40-to-60% lower cost compared to a full-time salary, benefits, and equity.
- Speed: With an average time-to-hire of only 14 days, fractional leaders are often brought in quickly to address urgent gaps or specific projects, delivering immediate impact.
- Specialized Expertise: Organizations can tap into highly skilled professionals with deep niche experience—ideal for complex regulatory filings, clinical trial strategies, fundraising, and M&A planning.
- Flexibility: Engaging a fractional leader for a defined period can serve as a bridge to a full-time hire as the company grows and the workload increases.
Fractional leaders are often the preferred strategy for organizations that need experts in-house as quickly as possible to help solve immediate challenges, fill interim openings, and/or complete term-based projects.
Choosing a Hybrid Approach
Many companies are now adopting a hybrid approach – combining full-time leaders and fractional talent to stay agile, scale effectively, and meet business goals. This approach works well in many circumstances.
Benefits of hybrid workforce models include:
- Early-stage or cash-conscious companies can rely on fractional executives to guide early growth, fundraising, or technical milestones. Yet there are also times in their growth when full-time leaders are necessary to propel the organization’s trajectory.
- Mid- to late-stage organizations may need the guidance and continuity of full-time executives to lead commercialization or IPO prep. However, there are also occasions when fractional talent will help fill gaps over the short term.
Slone Partners: Your Talent Strategy Partner
At Slone Partners, we work closely with life sciences and healthcare organizations to assess their needs and deliver top-tier leadership—whether full-time or fractional. With deep industry insight, we help you make informed decisions that support your company’s mission and its next stage of growth.
Click here to download a hands-on worksheet to help companies assess their full-time vs factional talent needs.
