By Roei Samuel
Layoffs at Meta and JP Morgan have been making headlines, continuing a trend of workforce reductions that have been a consistent feature of workplace news for some time.
In the U.S. tech sector alone, nearly 300,000 people have been laid off since 2023, according to a Crunchbase News tally. An estimated 45% of companies anticipate layoffs in 2025, with 11% saying workforce reductions are definite and 34% reporting they are likely.
These layoffs are symptomatic of an increasingly fluid corporate talent market that is changing the way we think about work.
There is an unprecedented pool of professionals in the modern workforce who are no longer tethered to one organization. They have time and expertise that is ready to be deployed and spread across multiple organizations in flexible working arrangements. This has become known as fractional working, a model in which expert advisers in finance, marketing, product and other verticals leverage their expertise in part-time advisory roles.
This trend has been accelerating for years, and the primary beneficiary of this talent evolution will be startups.
Promoting a work-life balance
Hybrid working, remote working and working from home. Five years after the pandemic, these terminologies have become canon in our workplace lexicon. Lockdown reshaped the working world, freeing up hours once lost to commuting and shifting many people’s focus from job security to flexibility.
If the pandemic wasn’t a strong enough headwind to blow out the cobwebs from the world of corporate work, AI is catalyzing this transformation to the nth degree. We are now living in an AI-native age, the consequences of which will certainly lead to the proliferation of fractional working and the demise of the nine-to-five.
AI’s long-term impact on society is assured but unclear, its impact on productivity has been immediate. Personalized low-cost automation is augmenting the capacity of the average professional, allowing them to deliver more value in less time.
Work becomes less about the hours clocked and more about the impact delivered — what would you do if you got back 25% of your working week to do something else? This is the question many seasoned executives from companies such as Meta and JPMorgan may be asking themselves as they consider what to do with their years of high-level experience.
Saving startups money
There is a growing awareness among said professionals of a thriving market that is placing a premium on skills and will pay for the privilege of utilizing them: startups.
The rise of fractional hiring began as a cost-effective workaround for startups navigating the capital-constrained environment of the past few years.
Founders began realizing that bringing in domain experts on a flexible basis made financial sense. This circumstantial reality has since evolved into a strategic advantage, and startups are now using fractional talent to scale.
When we launched our platform in early 2022, startups were seeking to engage with an average of 1.7 fractional professionals per year. By the end of 2024, that number had more than doubled to 4.4. Fractional hiring is proving to be the natural end point of market headwinds that have delivered greater autonomy to experienced talent and strategic agility to the startups that engage them.
The general thesis behind fractional work is that startups often need experts at critical moments, but they don’t always need them full time. A fractional CMO, for example, can step in to shape a paid marketing campaign without having to monitor its progress full time. A fractional CRO can refine a sales playbook and resolve chokepoints as and when needed. Early-stage companies often don’t require a full-time finance team and can scale with ad-hoc accounting consultancy when tax season rolls around. An independent adviser brings an objective, experience-driven perspective, helping founders navigate blind spots they might not even realize exist. The rise of the fractional C-suite gives startups on-demand access to senior-level talent in a flexible arrangement that works both ways.
The rise of tech entrepreneurship has liberated people from old-fashioned notions of work and is transforming how people can leverage their experience to have more fulfilling and profitable careers. My view is that fractional working is not going away, and startups would do well to consider the potential of engaging fractional expertise. If you don’t, your competitors probably will.
Roei Samuel, founder and CEO of Connectd, is a successful serial entrepreneur, angel investor and board adviser. Having been featured in the BBC’s Million By 30 after his first business, RealSport, was acquired by Gfinity in a multimillion-pound deal, Samuel founded Connectd in 2019 after noticing the lack of support for startups. Connectd is a three-sided ecosystem that connects startups with expert talent and investors through a powerful combination of unique technology, data insights and reporting, and unrivaled support. Samuel is also a leading voice on startup development having been a Virgin StartUp mentor and sits on the independent advisory board for the U.K. government’s Digital Growth Grant, led by Barclays.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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