What questions should you ask before hiring a fractional communications director?

Hiring a fractional communications director is a significant decision. You are bringing someone into your organisation at a senior level, giving them access to your leadership team, your strategy, and your reputation. Getting it wrong is expensive in ways that go beyond the invoice.

These are the questions worth asking before you commit.

What have you actually done, with your own hands?

This is the most important question and the one most candidates will try to answer with a list of clients or campaigns rather than a direct account of their own work. Push past that. Have they written under deadline? Held a camera? Sat in a media crisis at midnight? Managed a journalist who was about to publish something damaging? Produced a podcast? Built an executive's LinkedIn presence from scratch?

Communications is a practical discipline. Seniority should mean more experience, not less execution. If the person you are considering has spent the last decade managing teams rather than doing the work, ask yourself whether that is what your organisation actually needs.

How broad is your experience across communications disciplines?

A fractional communications director who has only worked in one area — internal communications, say, or brand strategy — will bring a narrow set of tools to a broad set of problems. That limitation tends to show up at the worst possible moment. Ask specifically about media relations, content, social, crisis, executive communications, and digital. You want to know where their genuine depth is and where they will need to bring someone else in.

Who will actually do the work?

If you are hiring a person, confirm that the person is doing the work. Some fractional arrangements are effectively one-person fronts for junior subcontractors. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that model, but you should know what you are buying. Ask directly: when a piece of content needs writing, who writes it? When a journalist calls, who takes it?

What does your network look like?

No single person covers every communications discipline. The best fractional directors are honest about their limits and have a trusted network of specialists they can bring in when a brief requires it. Ask who those people are and how they work together.

How do you measure success?

Communications outcomes are notoriously difficult to quantify, and anyone who promises you specific metrics without understanding your business first is telling you what you want to hear. What you want is someone who can articulate what good looks like for your specific situation, and who has a disciplined approach to tracking progress against it.

Have you worked in our sector?

Not essential, but worth understanding. Sector experience accelerates the time it takes to become useful. If they have not worked in your industry, ask how they plan to get up to speed and how long that will realistically take.

What does the engagement actually look like?

How many hours or days per month? How are they structured? How do you communicate between sessions? What happens if a crisis emerges and they are not available? What are the notice periods? These practical questions matter as much as the strategic ones.