What does a fractional CHRO do?

A fractional CHRO is a former Chief People Officer or VP People who works part-time to build and run the people function: how you hire, how you pay, how you evaluate, how you develop leaders, and how you stay compliant across the states or countries you employ in.

They are distinct from an HR generalist, who administers the systems, and from a recruiter, who fills roles. The CHRO designs the systems and holds the leadership team accountable to them.

A standard 25-hour month covers:

• Hiring system: scorecards, interview loops, calibration, offer strategy
• Compensation: leveling framework, salary bands, equity guidelines, annual review cycle
• Performance: review cadence, feedback norms, promotion criteria, managing out
• Compliance: multi-state employment, classification, handbook, leave policies, required training
• Manager capability: onboarding new managers, coaching the leadership team
• Culture and retention: engagement measurement and targeted intervention rather than surveys for their own sake

What they do not do: day-to-day HR administration, payroll processing, and sourcing candidates. Those sit with an HR generalist, a PEO, or a recruiter.

Five triggers. You crossed roughly 40 employees and compensation decisions have become ad hoc. You are hiring across multiple states and nobody owns compliance. Regretted attrition is climbing and nobody can explain why. You are promoting individual contributors into management with no support system. Or you are preparing for diligence, where messy classification, missing offer letters, and unbanded compensation surface as real deal issues.

The cost of waiting here is unusual because people problems compound quietly and surface as attrition eight months later.

• Advisory, 10 to 15 hours per month: $4,000 to $7,000
• Standard, 20 to 30 hours: $7,000 to $12,000
• Heavy build or high-growth hiring, 30 to 45 hours: $12,000 to $16,000

Day rates run $1,200 to $2,400. A full-time CHRO commands $220,000 to $380,000 base plus equity. Companies under roughly 250 employees rarely need that seat full-time if a competent HR generalist or people operations manager handles administration.

An 85-person company had no leveling framework, salaries set by negotiation strength, and 26 percent annual attrition concentrated in engineering.

A fractional CHRO at 28 hours per month for $11,000 built a six-level framework benchmarked against market data, mapped every employee, identified $180,000 of internal inequity, and staged corrections across two quarters. Manager training on the new performance cycle ran alongside.

Within three quarters regretted attrition fell to 14 percent. At an estimated replacement cost of 50 to 100 percent of salary, avoiding roughly eight departures is worth well over $600,000 against $132,000 of annualized cost.

A PEO handles payroll, benefits administration, and baseline compliance for a per-employee fee. It is infrastructure, not strategy.

An HR generalist at $75,000 to $120,000 runs onboarding, employee relations, and administration day to day.

A fractional CHRO designs the systems those two operate: leveling, bands, performance criteria, hiring standards, and manager development.

Most companies between 40 and 250 employees are best served by a PEO or payroll platform, one HR generalist, and a fractional CHRO at 20 to 30 hours. That combination costs materially less than a full-time CHRO and covers more surface area.

Four to avoid:

• Hiring a recruiter and calling it a people function. Filling roles is not designing how you hire.
• Buying policy documents instead of systems. A handbook does not change manager behavior.
• Waiting for a crisis. Most CHRO engagements start after a lawsuit threat or a spike in attrition, when the cheapest interventions are no longer available.
• Excluding the CHRO from the leadership team. People systems only hold if the executives are held to them.

Post a private mandate on RecruitFractional with headcount, states of employment, and the specific people problem you need solved in 90 days. Reference-verified fractional CHROs respond within 72 hours and you can start with a paid trial.