Fractional TA

The Brief

Josh Winterson had built something early-stage founders really need. Traditional hiring solutions are an awkward fit for a start-up making five or ten crucial hires a year: agency fees per placement add up quickly, and a full-time internal recruiter sits idle between hiring waves. Fractional TA answers it with an embedded talent partner you turn on when you are hiring and off when you are not.

The challenge was that the brand had grown broader than the proposition. As the business found its focus, the positioning sharpened right down to one clear audience and one clear offer: fractional talent partners for early-stage start-ups. The brand needed to catch up and say that with total clarity.

Start-up founders are a discerning, time-poor audience. Anything woolly loses them in seconds, so the rebrand had to make the idea land immediately.

Our Actions

Gavin Cranshaw and Chris Cranshaw project managed the work, in close partnership with Josh throughout.

The rebrand started with the sharpened positioning and built outwards from there. The new identity is clean, modern and confident, pitched to feel at home in the start-up world where Fractional TA’s clients live, while carrying the credibility to be trusted with something as important as hiring.

The website was built to do one job supremely well: make the model obvious. It follows a founder’s own thought process, opening on why traditional hiring solutions fall short for early-stage start-ups, then explaining how the fractional model works in three simple steps, then getting straight to what it costs. Nothing wanders, and a visitor can understand the whole proposition in about a minute.

Halt also built the pricing section around a savings calculator, which has turned out to be the most persuasive part of the site.

The Savings Calculator

Some propositions are best explained with a number.

Fractional TA’s whole argument is economic. For a start-up making a handful of hires a year, a fractional partner costs far less than a full-time internal recruiter. Describing that in words works perfectly well. Letting a founder work it out for themselves is far more powerful.

So Halt built a calculator into the pricing section. A founder enters their estimated annual hires and sees the saving straight away, somewhere between 20 and 78 per cent depending on volume. It answers the one question they really have, and it does it before anyone needs to get on a call.

It has become a real sales tool as well as a design feature. Josh can share the link and let the numbers do the persuading, which is a lovely position for any founder to be in.