Senior, part-time HR leadership

Fractional HR for Ontario small and mid-sized businesses

The HR judgment of a Head of People, a few days a month, for employers who have outgrown running HR off the side of someone’s desk and aren’t big enough to justify a full-time hire.

Frank Newman, founder of Newman Human Resources
Frank Newman Founder · Newman Human Resources Close to fifty years in HR, and author of Your Best 10 Minutes: The 5 Cs of Creative Leadership.

HR obligations check

What are your HR obligations?

Answer four quick questions about your business and watch the plan build. The tool works out which rules apply to you, so you don’t need any HR knowledge.

How many people work for you?

A rough count of everyone, including full-time, part-time and seasonal staff, is fine. Check your HR obligations →
Cover of Your Best 10 Minutes: The 5 Cs of Creative Leadership by Frank Newman

The book

Your Best 10 Minutes

The 5 Cs of Creative Leadership

Leadership isn’t about titles or endless meetings. It’s about moments.
Frank Newman · Your Best 10 Minutes
  • Connecting
  • Clarity
  • Compassion
  • Courage
  • Coaching

Coming 2026 · not yet available to buy · With a foreword by Roz Usheroff.

The service

Fractional HR

Senior HR judgment for Ontario employers that have outgrown ad-hoc HR but can’t yet justify a full-time hire, at a few days a month scaled to what you actually need.

The term covers a few shapes.

  • On-call / on-demand

    On-call gives you a senior HR person for issues as they arise.

  • Embedded

    An embedded engagement is steady leadership a few days a month.

  • Project

    A project closes one defined gap.

What an engagement covers

the same areas a Head of People owns
  • Policy & compliance. Ontario-fit policies and handbooks, and staying onside of the ESA, OHSA, AODA, and the Human Rights Code.
  • Workplace investigations. Handling complaints and serious misconduct so a hard decision stays defensible if it’s ever tested.
  • Health & safety. Meeting your OHSA duties and building a safety program that actually runs, not a binder nobody opens.
  • Hiring & talent. Defensible, evidence-based hiring, onboarding that sticks, and filling the roles you can’t afford to get wrong.
  • Training & development. Growing managers and making performance a continuous practice, not an annual review.
  • Day-to-day employee relations. The everyday people questions, the terminations, and the tough conversations, with senior judgment on call when you need it and quiet the rest of the month.
Book a consultation The work is scoped to what you actually need, not sold as an off-the-shelf package.

Certification readiness

Great Place to Work® Certification

What certification actually is, when it’s worth pursuing, and how an accredited partner helps an Ontario employer get certification-ready, with the honest picture throughout rather than just the badge.

Being Certified is not the same as ranking on a “Best Workplaces” list. Certification is a threshold most genuinely good employers can reach, while the ranked lists are a competition.

Great Place to Work Accredited Professional badge
Trust Index threshold
65% (Canada)
Eligibility
10+ employees
Validity
12 months
Process
~1 month

Great Place to Work’s own published programme rules — how certification works.

A track record behind the advice

  • Helped influence Canada’s Employment Insurance Compassionate Care Leave, through collaboration with the federal government.
  • Led the HR work behind GlaxoSmithKline’s “50 Best Employers in Canada” standing for over a decade.
  • One of ten consultants in Canada certified in the Great Place to Work® methodology.

The next step

Too big for no HR, too small for a full-time hire.

If HR keeps landing on your desk, you’re not sure what Ontario law requires of you, or you’ve hit a problem bigger than a Google search, then that’s exactly the gap fractional HR fills. The first conversation is about whether you need it at all, and we’ll tell you straight.

Book a consultation Or call 519-362-8352