Why one CPO traded in full-time employment for fractional work

In April 2017, Barbie Brewer’s health took a turn for the worse. The then-VP of talent at Netflix was experiencing symptoms of what she would soon learn was a rare sarcoma cancer.

In order to focus on her health, while also going through a divorce and taking care of her two young kids, she realized she could no longer commute from her Pleasanton, California, home to Netflix’s office outside San Jose. So, in May 2017, she left the streaming giant in search of more flexible work.

At the time, full-time, remote jobs were few and far between, Brewer said, and she had doubts that she could find one while undergoing cancer treatment. She started consulting and freelancing part-time, but before long, she received an offer from a GitLab recruiter to become the fully remote software developer’s first chief culture officer. By August 2017, she was leading its 200 employees across 40 countries.

During this time, Brewer said she developed an expertise in working flexibly. That skill would serve her later in career, when she embarked on her most flexible role yet: fractional chief people officer.

Fractional executives are hired by companies to serve in their C-suites on a part-time or by-project basis. These sorts of roles have become increasingly popular in recent years, due to the acceleration of business transformation.

“The reason why you see this taking place, finally, at the executive level, reflects the complexity and nature of disruptions that executives are dealing with,” Robert Ployhart, business administration and management professor at the University of South Carolina, previously told HR Brew.

Brewer spoke with HR Brew about her career journey, and her experience as a fractional CPO.

Flash back. Brewer earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from Santa Clara University. But after a few years in the field, she left communications for HR, joining IBM, where she ran an internship program. She then went on to climb the ranks at Cisco and Sportvision.

While she gained a lot of experience working at big corporations, she said that when Netflix called in 2011, she was immediately drawn to its startup culture. At the time, the 14-year-old company was reinventing itself as a streaming platform.

“I loved the radical candor…I loved the high bar for talent, and they really lived it. I loved the people over process,” Brewer said. Brewer’s experience at Netflix shifted her career priorities. Going forward, she said she only wanted to lead HR at startups.

“I couldn’t see myself being happy and going back into a big Fortune 100 company…because those companies were a lot more bureaucratic than Netflix was, and so that’s when I decided I really want to work with startups,” she said. “They don’t have the ability to be overly bureaucratic. It’s ‘innovate.’ It’s ‘grow.’ It’s survival mode.”

Startups > corps. After leaving Netflix in 2017, Brewer spent two years at GitLab. During that time, she received cancer treatment at Sloan Kettering, where she said doctors were able to freeze her tumor, and put cancer in her rearview mirror.

She was also growing her consulting business on the side, and continued to do so in her next roles at software company ClickUp and LG. It was then that she realized some young companies only needed her HR expertise on a part-time basis and could benefit from having a fractional CPO.

So, when cybersecurity startup Safe Security recruited her to its CPO position last year, Brewer said she asked CEO Saket Modi if the role could be fractional. He said yes.

“It’s a great deal for the company,” she said, noting that it gave her the flexibility and autonomy she craved, and the company “the know-how and the knowledge from a very senior leader who’s seen it all and has been in the movie a few times without having to pay the full cost.”

Brewer said she enjoys working with startups and smaller companies because she can help them build a foundation for growth and scale. She compares her work to matchmaking—she introduces employers to what they should be offering their workforce, guides them until they reach a certain level of profitability, and then watches them expand their perks and benefits.

As long as fractional opportunities exist, Brewer said she’ll pursue them, though she’s not ruling out a return to full-time employment.

“I also know myself well enough to know that I do get sucked back in, so there are definite times where I said, ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to stick with it,’ and then a company convinces me to come in full-time,” she said. “So, that could happen again in the future.”