Fractional HR Director

Location: Remote / Hybrid - Brussels, Belgium

October 2026 to June 2027 | 1 to 3 days per month | Freelance

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Bambaw is a sustainable consumer goods company building multiple brands across home textiles, personal care, oral care, and everyday essentials. Our products are sold across Europe, the USA, and Canada through Amazon, our own e-commerce channels, and wholesale. We are about 30 people: half in Brussels, half remote across Europe and beyond.

We are looking for a Fractional HR Director to challenge how we build our People function, and to coach the people who will run it.

The Challenge

We have built a lot on paper. A performance review system, a compensation architecture, a hiring playbook. What we do not have is one system that everyone reads the same way.

Some pieces are missing. Others are applied differently by every manager. Several of our team leads were promoted from operator roles this year and are managing people for the first time. Our Office Manager is moving into a People Operations role and is learning the function as she goes. When something falls between the gaps, a founder picks it up.

We are not looking for someone to run HR for us, or to build it for us. We do the building. We are looking for someone who has done this before to tell us where we are wrong, and to coach our people until they can run it without you.

How The Work Actually Happens

This is a review, challenge and coaching role. You will not be asked to produce our documents, run our processes or attend our meetings.

A typical month. We send you a package a few days ahead: a document we have drafted, a design decision we are weighing, or a live case we are handling. You read it and comment in writing. We hold a call to work through your comments and disagree properly. You then coach our People Operations Manager on what comes next.

That loop is the engagement. It works because producing documents is not our constraint. Judgment is.

The Mandate

1. Challenge what we build

Review and comment on what we draft: the performance and talent system, career tracks and their link to pay, culture, the roadmap and its sequencing. Tell us what to keep, fix and drop, what we are missing, and what we should deliberately not build at our size.

2. Coach the people who run it

Our People Operations Manager into the confident owner of the function. Our first-time managers on feedback, 1:1s and difficult conversations. Our founders from filling gaps to leading leaders and reviewing talent.

3. Be the sparring partner on hard cases

Performance issues, absence, separations and compliance. You bring the judgment and the Belgian legal reality check. We handle the case.

How We Work

Start small, then grow. We begin with one defined project. If the match works on both sides, the engagement runs through to June 2027. We would rather prove the fit on real work than commit on the strength of a good conversation.

We come with a point of view, not a blank page. Expect drafts, recommendations and decisions already leaning one way. Your value is disagreeing where we are wrong, and being specific about why.

Coaching over delivery. Most of this engagement is spent developing people rather than producing deliverables. Success is that by June we do not need you.

Who We're Looking For

You have built a People function at a small company, not administered one at a large company. You have grown a junior HR person into an autonomous role and can describe how you handed it over. You can read a draft and see the three things that will break in practice, and you are comfortable saying so directly.

Must-have

• 10+ years in HR, including at least 3 leading a People function independently
• At least one full People function build at a company under 100 people
• Track record of coaching first-time managers, and of growing an internal HR owner to autonomy
• Talent reviews and career frameworks connected to pay, built and actually used
• Working knowledge of Belgian employment law and the social secretariat ecosystem
• Comfortable working through written feedback and short calls rather than long workshops
• French and English

Nice-to-have

• Fractional or shared-time (temps partagé) experience across several SMEs
• E-commerce, consumer goods or scale-up environments
• Remote and international teams, including non-EU contractors
• EU Pay Transparency exposure
• Teaching, training or facilitation background

Not the Right Role If

• You need to produce the work yourself to feel useful
• You want to run the function rather than coach someone into it
• You deliver frameworks and decks but have never made one stick with a real team
• You arrive with a methodology to sell rather than a view on what we already have
• Your engagements tend to extend rather than end
• You need three or more days a week, or full autonomy from hands-on founders

What We Offer

• A real foundation to build on. Not a blank page, and not a mature function either
• Direct work with the co-CEO and a People Ops lead who is eager to grow
• A clear mandate with a defined end state, and no ambiguity about what success looks like
• A light time commitment with real influence, and a client that does its homework
• A mission-driven company where sustainability isn't a marketing angle. It's the product.

Interested? xqknzec Send us a short note on the closest situation you have handled to ours: what you did, and how it ended.