The rise of Fractional remote jobs

Hey,

I'm Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my plan to help 1000 people find remote jobs, which I'll soon achieve with the Jobs Copilot. I'm launching this month of April for the 1300+ people on the waitlist.

Today I'm telling you about the rise of remote Fractional careers, which means people working a limited number of hours for multiple companies, instead of working 40 hours/week for 1 company.

I'm certainly an example of such a career, having worked as a Fractional CTO for several years. I'm actually lecturing a live workshop about "How to start a Fractional/Freelance career" on Tuesday, in the Remote Jobs Braintrust. Join us if you're interested.

The thing that most people look for in a Fractional career is flexibility on two levels:

• Time: Instead of committing 40 hours per week to a company, they can allocate their time flexibly to different companies.

• Location: Instead of having one company dictating where they must work from, people are preferring to work with remote companies.

There's also money as an attractive. Fractional roles can have very interesting hourly rates, much higher than the pro-rated pay in equivalent full time jobs, as I wrote about in this recent Twitter thread.

For these reasons, many people have started Fractional careers, and what's interesting is that it's not just for executive roles (where Fractional CTO is the 3rd most demanded role, after Fractional CFO and Fractional CMO).

Many people are positioning as Fractional for individual contributor roles as well. I'm seeing many Fractional Software Engineers, Fractional Designers and so on. It seems like the Fractional value proposition is a brushed up productisation of the otherwise freelance contractors.

I'm even seeing Fractional workers outside tech, such as this message I received yesterday, in the Real Estate industry:

It's great that so many people are interested in having a Fractional career. But it would very frustrating if there wouldn't be companies wiling to hire them on such a capacity.

Fortunately, it's not just the supply side that's growing fast. Companies are also seeing the benefits of hiring employees on a Fractional capacity. The upsides are clear:

• Lower time to hire.

• Lower headcount cost.

• And much higher level of experience.

I'm seeing companies searching for Fractional roles increasing fast, as I tweeted a couple weeks ago, one of my clients searched on Google and found me:

I'm even seeing job descriptions for Fractional roles these days, which was unheard of just a year ago. See this recent one I saw on Wellfound:

Still, most people who try to start a Fractional career, struggle with finding consistent clients who are willing to pay their rate. This creates huge anxiety over the bumpy nature of income, and drives people to abandon their Fractional career very early on.

Most people wrongly assume that clients will magically find them, but it doesn't work like that. There's lots of "invisible" work to be done, before clients find you. And further more, there's work you can do to find clients as well. It's called Marketing and Sales, and it doesn't come natural to most of us who've worked full time jobs for so many years.

In this recent Twitter thread, I've walked through some tactics I use, such as:

• Creating an inbound flow of clients.

• Applying to full time jobs and selling the Fractional capacity.

• Searching for companies that need you, but don't know yet.

I'll be diving deep into this topic on Tuesday at 11am UK time, in this live session at the Remote Jobs Braintrust. As always, there will be Q&A and the session will be recorded for those who can't watch it live. I look forward to seeing you there, if you aren't yet in the community, join us here.

I'm also working hard to finish the JobsCopilot.ai, and launch it this month of April. Private testing is going well, fixing some bugs and fine tuning the matchmaking between users and jobs. I'm super pumped to get it on the hands of the 1300+ pioneers on the waitlist. Exciting times!

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

If you're interested in sponsoring this newsletter, send me an email or DM.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira, 
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover