Part II: Planning for fractional work: four lessons from our own experiences

TL;DR: Mission-driven orgs see continuous fluctuation in staffing demands. We built an Embedded Search service fueled by fractional workers to meet that flux. Along the way, we had some missteps. We learned from those missteps and want to share what we learned, so here are four lessons for successfully embedding fractional work into your own organization.

A few years ago, I was working as part of a talent acquisition team at a large nonprofit where I’d been employed for over a decade. After multiple rounds of layoffs—not a fun experience—I found myself on a dramatically downsized team tasked with implementing a new strategic approach. I didn’t feel bought into the team’s direction and knew I was ready to try something new.

Having spent my career in social sector talent acquisition, I’ve seen mission-driven organizations continuously wrestle to balance hiring capacity with fluctuating demand. When organizations see a lull in growth, they might downsize their talent acquisition teams. Suddenly, something changes—a wave of resignations, say, or an influx of new grants—and the urgent staffing need requires organizations to quickly scale up again. Some organizations never have the budget to hire adequate talent acquisition staff. All these inefficiencies slow down the hiring process, often resulting in organizations hiring people not fully aligned with their needs.

So I was enthusiastic when RCG founder Matt Reamy asked me to help him build what would become our Embedded Search service, providing hourly capacity to mission-driven organizations as they hire. RCG would operate as an extension of orgs’ teams, learning how to speak compellingly about their work and operating within their existing talent practices.

This service served a real need. There were a ton of large talent firms staffing every part of the search process for a price tag usually high enough to deter organizations from investing in roles outside of the C-Suite. There were also a ton of individuals moonlighting on searches for hourly, more affordable rates, but who lacked the infrastructure necessary to be effective. By cultivating an elastic pool of contractors that could flex up or down to meet client organizations’ varying search capacity needs—including sourcing, screening, and designing interviews—RCG could dedicate its core staff to the evergreen need for project management and operations, and ultimately provide a more cost-effective, responsive, and seamless search experience for clients.

But I had real concerns about building a service that heavily depended on contractors.

“People can be flaky,” I warned Matt. “How do we incentivize people who aren’t employees? There’s going to be inconsistency. We’re going to have to deal with quality control.” I was taking a leap of faith by transitioning from a full-time job to jumping in at RCG as a fractional worker. But discussing potential challenges deepened my conviction that, through trial and error, we could build an impactful service that complemented organizations’ talent teams (or lack thereof).

A lot of my concerns played out. Sometimes, contractors with full-time jobs wouldn’t think through the logistics of when they could conduct interviews, making it difficult for our operations team to schedule anything. Some contractors didn’t take or submit interview notes. Others spent twice the hours for which they’d been budgeted compiling overly detailed notes. Also, we spent a lot of money compensating contractors for holding hours that they never used.

Despite all our forethought about potential challenges, there was still stuff that we missed. On one occasion, a contractor posted about a role using unapproved language. Another time, a contractor tagged a former employer in a post recruiting job applicants for another organization; the former employer saw it as poaching. In both cases, our contractors only meant to tap into their personal networks to support our client organizations in finding great talent. But it was clear we needed to provide more guidance. Ultimately, we created a social media policy guiding contractors to appropriately leverage their networks as representatives of RCG.

These are only a sample of our missteps in building what would become RCG’s Embedded Search service. But we worked them out. Today, I’m proud to say that we’ve built the only search service on the market that uses contractors to fill in an organization’s hiring capacity gaps.

One of my favorite things about working at RCG is that it’s a real learning organization. We own and learn from our mistakes—and once we figure out what works, we want to share our learning. So, if you’re interested in using fractional work to build flexible and affordable capacity at your own organization, here are four considerations.

1. Get real about your capacity, goals, and inefficiencies. What opportunity does fractional work open up for you? Do you need to expand and diversify the perspectives at your organization? Are you looking to save money? Which areas of your work volume ebb and flow, and how might fractional work help you respond quickly to those fluctuations without taking on full-time staff?

2. Clarify your expectations and organize your logistics. Everybody needs to be on the same page about the expectations of the job, ranging from technology platforms to schedules. We’ve built an onboarding process that introduces contractors to our different tools and processes, and provides estimates for how much time each task should take. And before assigning a new contractor to any project, we establish expectations and confirm availability so they can opt in or out from the get-go.

3. Remember that money is time; time is money. Fractional workers can fill in the gaps when you don’t have the budget for a full-time or part-time person. But you also want to ensure that contractors feel like it’s worth their time to prioritize their work with you. When we ask contractors to hold large blocks of time over multiple months, we might set up a retainer that guarantees a minimum payment so they can feel secure about holding that time for us. Also, we want our contractors to be as invested in delivering quality work as our full-time staff, so we pay them hourly rates that are aligned to the market value for that work.

4. Reorganize your policies and culture-building mechanisms to honor the gradation in your team. There’s a tendency to regard contractor relationships as simply transactional. Because contractors are not part of the staff, we can think of them as not part of the team. But they totally are! How do you navigate the ambiguity of fractional work? How do you want your contractors to represent your organization externally? How do you keep contractors engaged when they’re not actively on a project?

Organizations often operate from the default assumption that contractors don’t require the infrastructure that we build for full-time employees. After all, fractional work frees us from a lot of the constraints of traditional working relationships. But as in any working relationship, the contractor and employer still need to be on the same page in terms of expectations—around goals, time, pay, etc.—and that requires systems and processes.

If you develop the proper guardrails, bringing fractional workers onto your team can be a gamechanger for efficiently and sustainably generating impact. Check out the next issue for a case study of how one partner organization powered by a small core team and an extensive network of fractional workers is diversifying the leadership of schools and out-of-school programs in Colorado. Until then!

Ghostwritten by April Bo Wang, founder of Little Tiger Strategic Storytelling, who has been advising RCG on our storytelling and communications strategy in a fractional capacity. Multiple people, including Gina Chapman, Brent Locke, and Julio Negron contributed to this piece. Angelica, Brent, and Julio are full-time RCG employees who started out as fractional workers, and Gina continues to work with RCG in a fractional capacity