Hiring Was Never Broken

Why fractional leadership is booming, and why founders are rethinking traditional hiring models says Marms Hope operations manager , based in Dubai.

OPINION PIECE

Marms Hope

7/31/20263 min read

I have watched the same role fail three times inside one company. The same job description, with the same salary band, and three capable people, each gone within a year. After the third, the founder asked me what was wrong with the market.

Nothing was wrong with the market. The role was an answer to a question nobody had asked properly.

There is a particular relief that arrives when a founder decides to hire. The problem has been named. It has a title, a band, a start date. I understand that relief. But over twenty years of building and fixing operations across five countries, I have learned to be suspicious of it, because the speed at which a problem becomes a job description is rarely the speed at which it was understood.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Six months to recruit. Six months to onboard. Twelve months to discover it was never the right person. Two years, and the gap is still sitting there.

What has changed is that founders have started doing that maths out loud, and when they do, they arrive at an uncomfortable distinction. A salary buys you someone's availability, what it does not buy you is their judgment. Most companies were paying for the first while quietly hoping for the second.

Availability is abundant. Judgment is not.

This is where fractional leadership has found its moment. Not as a cheaper option, which is how it is often misread, but as a more precise one. When a business is short of capacity, hiring is the right instrument. When it is short of judgment in one specific area, hiring is an expensive way of buying time.

I would offer HR leaders one exercise. Look at your open senior roles and ask, honestly, how many exist because the organisation is genuinely short of hands, and how many exist because a decision has not been made and a hire feels like a reasonable place to put it. In my experience the second number is never zero.

There is also a cost nobody enters on the spreadsheet. Every person you hire is a person who must be led, developed, corrected, retained. That is a leadership tax, and it is drawn from the account the founder is already overdrawn on. Attention. I have watched a founder hire to feel lighter and become heavier. Six months of onboarding, three difficult conversations, one resignation.

The second force is one the talent profession should watch closely, because it is happening on the supply side.

A generation of senior operators no longer wants one chair and one logo. People with twenty years behind them are choosing range over title. The pattern recognition sharpens when you are inside four businesses rather than one. If your only proposition to that person is a permanent seat, you are no longer competing for a meaningful part of the senior talent pool. That is not a threat to the hiring function, but a design brief.

For learning and development, there is a further argument that I think is underused. An embedded senior leader who is present for nine months has every incentive to leave the team able to operate without them. A permanent hire has no such incentive, and knowledge tends to concentrate in that one person until the day they resign and walk out with it. Handled well, fractional leadership is capability transfer with a deadline attached.

I would not present this as a universal answer. Culture is built by people who stay. Continuity and institutional memory are not served by rotation. The wrong use of fractional leadership is outsourcing responsibility. The right use is narrow and honest. There is a gap that requires judgment we do not have, and we cannot afford to wait three years to grow it internally.

In this region I see something I did not see elsewhere. Functions here are being built now rather than inherited. There is no forty-year-old structure to defend. Ambition is stated plainly, decisions are made at a speed that would unsettle most Western boards, and the appetite to design rather than repair is real. It is a rare position, and I do not think it stays open indefinitely.

None of this is new, which is the part I find most interesting. Non-executive directors, advisory boards, interim leadership, the family office that retains the finest legal mind in the country for eleven hours a year and would never dream of employing him. Sophisticated capital has always bought expertise by the slice. It simply had no name and required no defence.

The question in front of us is no longer who we need to hire. It is what do we need in the room, at what level of judgment, and for how long.

Hiring was never broken. The assumption underneath it was.

Marms’ profile

linkedin.com/in/marmshope