How Fractional Talent Helped Wawa Build a Stronger Hiring Function

There are points in a company's growth where hiring suddenly becomes a much bigger job than anyone internally has the capacity to manage but that doesn't necessarily mean the answer is to immediately hire a full-time Head of Talent.

Sometimes what you actually need is experienced support for a period of time. Someone who can come in, take ownership of hiring, build the foundations that are missing and then flex back down again once things are under control.

That's exactly what happened with Wawa Fertility.

Wawa had recently raised its Series A and had grown quickly, going from around 10 people to more than 30 in roughly six months, with a significant amount of further hiring planned. Until that point, hiring had largely been managed internally by the founders and leadership team, but it had reached the stage where that was no longer sustainable.

They didn't just need help filling roles. They needed someone to take a much broader look at how hiring was working and put the right foundations in place for the next stage of growth.

Starting with more than just the open roles

We initially embedded a Talent Nova advisor four days a week.

There were a number of live and upcoming roles to manage, but the remit went much further than search and delivery. Wawa didn't yet have an ATS in place, their hiring processes had largely developed organically and there were several areas that needed more structure as the company grew.

The first priority was getting closer to the leadership team and understanding what they actually needed to hire, how those roles should be prioritised and what the market looked like for some of the harder profiles.

Alongside taking ownership of live hiring, we implemented Teamtailor, started creating a more structured careers page and worked across areas including employer branding, market mapping, compensation and role design.

The point wasn't to add process for the sake of it. It was to make sure Wawa could continue hiring quickly without every new role becoming another manual project for the founders.

Building the foundations while still delivering hires

This is one of the things that makes fractional Talent different from simply bringing in external support to fill vacancies.

You still need to deliver against the immediate hiring plan, but at the same time you're looking at everything around it.

That meant making sure roles were properly defined, giving hiring teams better structure, improving how candidates moved through the process and creating the systems that would make future hiring easier.

The work also extended into onboarding. We looked at what happened once someone had accepted an offer and how that handover into the business could be made smoother, rather than treating candidate experience and employee onboarding as two completely separate things.

For a growing company, connecting those pieces is important. The experience someone has during the hiring process shouldn't suddenly stop the moment they sign their contract.

Bringing market insight into the hiring plan

Part of the value of having an experienced Talent partner embedded in the company is being able to challenge assumptions when the market is telling you something different.

For example, the team was initially exploring some roles in Copenhagen but the candidate market wasn't producing the type of profile or cultural fit they needed. Based on what we were seeing, the location strategy for some of that hiring shifted towards London instead.

The same applied to compensation and harder to fill technical roles. Rather than continuing with a brief simply because that was where it started, we could bring real market feedback into conversations with the leadership team and help them understand what was realistic.

That becomes particularly valuable at Series A, where companies are often hiring roles for the first time and don't necessarily have an internal benchmark to work from.

Fractional support can change as your hiring changes

One of the biggest benefits of the fractional model is that the level of support doesn't need to stay the same forever.

Wawa initially needed someone deeply embedded in the business four days a week because there was a lot to build and a significant hiring plan to work through. A few months later, the picture had changed.

Hiring volumes reduced, some priorities shifted and the business no longer needed the same level of embedded support. Rather than continuing to pay for four days a week simply because that was how the engagement had started, we reduced the support down to one day a week, with the option to increase it again when hiring picks up.

For us, that flexibility is a big part of what fractional Talent should look like. The aim isn't to create a permanent dependency on external support, it's to give the company the level of senior Talent capability it needs at that point in time.

You don't always need to make the permanent hire yet

For early-stage companies, hiring a full-time Head of Talent can be a difficult decision.

You may have enough hiring to justify senior support today, but not know what the hiring plan will look like six or twelve months from now. Equally, bringing someone in too junior because the business isn't ready to invest in a senior permanent hire can leave the founders still carrying much of the strategic work themselves.

Fractional support gives you another option.

You can bring in someone experienced enough to take ownership, build the ATS and hiring foundations, understand the market, improve processes and deliver against the immediate plan, without committing to a permanent role before you really understand what that role needs to look like.

And actually, one of the useful outcomes of a fractional engagement is that by the time you are ready to hire permanently, you have a much clearer idea of what you need. You've seen which parts of the role require the most attention, what level of hiring the company is likely to maintain and which skills will matter most in the next stage of growth.

Build what you need now, without overbuilding for later

Fractional Talent works particularly well when you're in that in-between stage.

Hiring has become too much for founders, People teams or functional leaders to manage alongside their day jobs, but the business isn't yet ready for a full-time senior Talent hire. That’s exactly where Fractional Talent can work well, giving the business experienced support without forcing a permanent hire before the timing is right.

The goal should be to solve the immediate hiring challenge while also leaving the company in a stronger position than you found it.

That might mean implementing the ATS, improving the hiring process, building better market and compensation data, creating a stronger careers presence, connecting hiring with onboarding and giving the business a clearer idea of what its future Talent function needs to look like.

Then, as the hiring plan changes, the support can change with it.

Hiring is growing but you're not ready for a permanent Head of Talent?
Fractional support gives you experienced Talent leadership during periods of growth, with the flexibility to increase or reduce support as your hiring needs change. Get in touch.