CHRO Expert Operator – Twanya Hood Hill

A Head of People is typically a senior individual contributor or manager who owns the day-to-day operation of the people function – running recruiting, managing HR processes, and executing the people programs the leadership team has defined. A CHRO operates at the executive decision-making layer – defining compensation philosophy, organizational design, talent strategy, and the people function's roadmap, then partnering with the CEO and board on the people decisions that affect the company's trajectory. A fractional CHRO provides the executive layer without the full-time cost or the 4–6 month search timeline. Most companies between 40 and 150 employees need CHRO-level thinking 2–3 days per week, not 5 – which makes a fractional model more economically appropriate than a full-time hire.

Four signals indicate CHRO-level leadership is needed. First, compensation inconsistency is creating retention risk – employees are comparing notes and finding wide variation in comp for similar scope and performance. Second, hiring is a bottleneck – the operating plan requires 20+ hires in 12 months and no defined hiring architecture exists. Third, management quality varies significantly across the org – some teams are high-performing and others are struggling, and the difference is management, not the work. Fourth, voluntary attrition is above 15% annually – which typically indicates a combination of management quality gaps and compensation issues that require executive intervention, not HR program fixes. If two or more of these are present simultaneously, a CHRO-level engagement is appropriate.

A compensation framework at the Series B stage does not require a dedicated comp team – it requires three inputs and a decision process. The three inputs are: market data (Radford, Levels.fyi, or Carta for equity benchmarks, depending on roles), a role leveling framework (a written description of each level and its scope, decision authority, and output expectations), and an equity philosophy (how the company thinks about equity grants relative to cash comp, and how that changes by level and function). With those three inputs, you can build a compensation band for every role in the company and a process for evaluating new hires and existing employees against those bands. The process takes 4–6 weeks to build correctly. The alternative – making comp decisions without a framework – is cheaper in week one and expensive for the following two years.

A fractional CHRO engagement with Twanya typically runs on a 2–3 day per week commitment for an initial 3-month engagement, with renewal options based on what the company needs after the first quarter. The first month is diagnostic: an audit of the current people function across compensation, hiring, management, and culture. The second and third months are build and execute: working through the priority areas identified in the audit while maintaining the company's active hiring and people operations. After 3 months, the engagement either transitions to a lighter advisory cadence (appropriate when the full-time CHRO search is in progress), extends at the same intensity (appropriate when the search is delayed or on hold), or concludes with a handoff package for the incoming CHRO.

The first 30 days produce two tangible outputs even in a people function crisis: a prioritized audit of the highest-risk situations (the comp outliers most likely to leave, the open roles most critical to the operating plan, the management gaps most likely to produce attrition), and a 90-day plan that sequences remediation based on that risk assessment. Immediate stabilization – meaning the situations most likely to produce urgent departures or legal exposure are addressed – typically happens within 45–60 days. Systemic improvement (consistent compensation banding, defined hiring architecture, operating management cadence) takes the full 90-day initial engagement. Companies in acute crisis should not expect a 30-day fix; they should expect a 30-day stabilization followed by a 60-day systematic build.