As high-growth companies grapple with a highly competitive and expensive talent market for senior leadership, Kevin MacIntyre, CEO of Halifax-based SeasonedPros, is seeing demand for his business swell.

SeasonedPros, which was founded in 2011 and adopted its current name in 2021, matches businesspeople with 15 to 20 years of experience with employers for fractional employment roles. Those experienced leaders dedicate some portion of a full workweek to a project over a predetermined, but flexible period of time.

MacIntyre said in an interview that aging demographics mean senior business leaders are increasingly retiring at a rate faster than experienced replacements can be found, putting pressure on companies to find novel recruitment solutions.

Statistics Canada projects that by 2036, the national labour force participation rate will drop to 63 percent or less, compared to 66 percent in 2017, and it cites an aging population as the main reason for the decline.

“The pain point of the world talent shortage is only going to get worse in the next 10 years, due to an aging population,” said MacIntyre. “There’s several solutions to it. There’s newcomers, there’s people staying in the job market longer and fractional (hiring) is another part of it.”

He added that SeasonedPros, which has developed a database of several thousand professionals interested in fractional roles, is particularly popular with what he describes as organizations with an “early-adopter mindset,” such as startups and some NGOs.

At the cost of taking a risk on a non-standard employment model, fractional hiring offers those organizations the ability to tap high-end talent quickly and at modest cost, since the seasoned pros commit less of their time to the business and consequently take home less net compensation.

In general, MacIntyre said, fractional executives are usually paid at rates comparable to what they would be earning in full-time roles, proportional to how much time they spend working, though details of agreements can vary.

The ability to more easily control costs and fill roles without a full-scale recruitment process, he added, has made fractional hiring popular with startups. Often, those employers need the specific expertise of a professional such as a chief financial officer or chief technical officer long enough to oversee specific elements of their growth, but lack the resources or need to hire a permanent employee.

“I think smaller businesses look at it and go, ‘I do need the guidance of a CFO, but I need it one day a week — I don't need it five days, or I can't afford it five days,’” said MacIntyre.

“They’re looking at the fractional model and saying, ‘It's a great way to tap into a resource I need within budget.”

Data about the prevalence of fractional executive hiring is thin on the ground, but fractional staffing firms have proliferated across North America in recent years. MacIntyre said some employers are starting to view the practice as a third pillar of their hiring strategies, alongside jobs boards and conventional recruitment agencies.

“Not only are companies getting it — they see the cost, effectiveness and flexibility — but also, you can’t fill every full-time role (in the economy),” he said. “There’s a world talent shortage.”

A global survey conducted by American talent agency Korn Ferry in 2019 found that nearly 70 percent of the human resources executives they surveyed worried their organizations lacked the right future leaders, both in terms of quality and quantity.

And a Gartner poll last year found almost a third of CEOs rank workforce concerns including recruitment and retention among their top three strategic concerns.

SeasonedPros, meanwhile, has about 10 employees and operations in the Atlantic provinces and Ontario, with the details of a future expansion yet to be decided.

“We’re not geographically bounded,” said MacIntyre, citing the fact many fractional employees work remotely. “If you take a look at where we’ve placed seasoned pros with clients, we’ve done some on the West Coast, we’ve done some in Quebec. Our current focus is to build our sales in Ontario and Atlantic as a business strategy but we recently had a client call us from Vancouver saying, ‘Can you help us fill this very specific role?’

“If we have the needed type of experience and talent in our database, we can help them, provided the role is remote.”