Where to Recruit & Hire a Fractional CTO?

When considering where and how to hire a fractional CTO, it’s essential to differentiate between role-specific communities, costs, time investment and a couple other factors. How you answer the next couple questions can help determine where to hire a fractional CTO.

Are you willing to pay a premium for a pre-vetted expert?

There’s something to be said about the increase in companies specializing sourcing Fractional Work lately. From what we’ve seen, these platforms/places act initially as recruiters finding the best talent open to Fractional Work by conducting interviews with them – both technical and non-technical – to ensure that they are a good fit for their platform.

Some of where you can find Fractional Talent –

• Go Fractional: This platform specializes in offering a range of fractional executive talents across a variety of industries. The process with your startup or business is to hold a brief intro call to hear more about what skillsets you’re looking to hire for and then Go Fractional works with the hundreds of members of their community.
  • You can view my Go Fractional profile here – I’m even featured on the Software Engineering Leadership page with two other highlighted members (screenshot below).
• UseShiny – You can find and hire from over 400+ fractional executives from all fields on Shiny. However, it should be noted that this service is a bit of a mystery to me since the application processes relies on network referrals to also join. From their marketing website, it appears that they are similar to Go Fractional when it comes to sourcing your company talent based on a brief intro call.
• Esteemed – Similar to the two previous sites listed. Esteemed has over 1,500 professionals in a variety of disciplines that can be hired thru their platform to help your business.

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Are you willing to sift thru hundreds of applicants?

This one will be the biggest time sink. Typically with these platforms require you to review potentially hundreds of applicants / interest parties for the work. Be sure to think about how long it’ll take you to sort thru hundreds of lackluster resumes to find the one diamond in the rought.

• Upwork – You can view My Profile Here – this feels like the go-to for sifting thru applicants outside of a traditional job posting.
• Fiverr: Fiverr’s mission is to change how the world works together. Fiverr connects businesses with freelancers offering digital services in 500+ categories. I haven’t used Fiverr to find clients, but I’ve certainly used them to hire talent to help with one-off tasks.
• Arc.dev – Not much else to say about this. Similar to the other platforms above.

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Do you need more than just a Fractional CTO?

As mentioned in the first question – there are other places where you can find more than just Fractional CTOs – like Fractional Head of People, Fractional CMOs, Fractional CFOs, and so on.

Most of the platforms that I’ve explored have fractional roles for a variety of positions – CMO, CIO, CFO, CTO, CPO, CXO, etc. You just need to spend a little time thinking about what matters to you – paying a bit more for pre-vetted talent or trying to find a hidden gem.

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Would you prefer them to be located near you?

Some people may want their Fractional CTO to live in the same area as them for in-person collaboration opportunities. While 55% of the world shifted to work from home in October 2020 – that number has been steadily shrinking. Estimates from the Pew Research Center from March 2023 stated that only 35% of all workers who can work from home full-time choose to do so.

If you live in or near a major city, we’d recommend attending Professional Networking or Industry Events or even Hackathons. These could be with groups specific to your industry or general software engineering meetup groups. While you’ll be able to sift thru people in person at these events, your candidate pool is drastically reduced by the geography of where you are located.

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Our Top Recommendation

This should come as no surprise. But, we would strongly recommend that your company consider reaching out to Go Fractional to setup an intro call. It is quick and painless to be able to

All in all, the landscape is is still being developed with where to find Fractional CTOs and other Fractional Talent to help you focus on what matters. As that landscape evolves, we will be sure to update this post with where to find all Fractional Talent.

If we missed something, be sure to Contact Us.

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