It's 2026, move beyond full-time FFS !

Published on October 10, 2026 3:36 PM GMT High-Impact Professionals is a fantastic resource for experienced professionals looking to work with impactful organisations, and, more importantly, for organisations looking for experienced professionals to help them become more impactful. Recently, they have created a new job-board which makes the process of "match-making" even easier and smoother. I checked out the job-board today.  I had one problem. The job-board is great, the problem lies with the organisations looking for experienced people - or who claim to be looking for experienced people, but maybe are not really.  Here is the number that best captures this. There are over 1000 full-time roles available for experienced professionals, and only 12 (twelve !!) part-time roles.  This is absurd! It makes me think that many organisation literally have not thought this through.  If you start from a simple model where all your employees are full-time people, mostly straight out of college, it's too easy to default into the idea that that is the only kind of employee you can or should have. I'd like to challenge this assumption.  Please ask yourself some questions: Why do you want an experienced person? Is it just to fill a normal staff-position (as in, sure, we won't discriminate against you if you're old), or is it actually to take advantage of the person's unique skills and experience? Can you define the problem you think this person would solve? If yes, have you really thought through how many hours per week or how many days per month you would need this person to solve that problem? If you want to take advantage of their skills and expertise and experience, do you really have a full-time role where, for most of the time, they will be using these? If you think it'd be great to hire an experienced HR-manager or Research-leader, who may have worked in big organisations where they handled 1000 people running 100 projects, do you really think they will need 40 hours to manage the HR needs of your start-up? If not, what do you expect them to do for the rest of the time? Just be a highly overpaid ordinary team-member? Or (from their POV if you pay them less) be a highly under-paid team-member doing work which the average 20-year-old could do better. Have you thought about salary? Do you plan to guilt them into accepting a low salary because that's what all the other staff (in their 20's without kids or mortgages) take? Or do you plan to break the bank to hire them, and then find yourself paying $200/hr to people who spend most of their day doing work that any of your $20/hr staff could do? (numbers not based on any data !) Have you ever talked to an experienced person about the specific value they would bring, and, equally important, did you believe them? In my experience, a lot of the value that experienced professionals can bring to a newish organisation is in areas where the org doesn't even realise there is a problem or an opportunity. It's a bit like explaining that you can use Claude to code or make Powerpoints to someone who has never seen AI - they think their current way of making Powerpoints is quite efficient. Have you ever talked to an experienced professional about the possibility of being unemployed in their 50's, while dealing with mortgage, kids, college, and having to re-enter a job-market where age-bias is rampant and AI is taking over much of the knowledge work they may excel at? Do you really think it's a good strategic move for an experienced professional with a steady job to give that up, put all their eggs in one basket and go work for your start-up, knowing where they'll end up if it doesn't work out? But maybe if your offer was for them to spend a few hours / week helping your org, they might even do it for free, in parallel to their day-job. How do you see the work-relationship between you (e.g. the CEO) and the experienced person you wish to hire? If this person comes in with 20+ years of experience and you are 25, does this make you nervous? Do you worry that they may bring culture and changes that you may not approve of, but to which they can give a lot of credibility? This will be easy to control if the person is part-time with a very defined role, but not if they are full-time. Do you judge a potential hire's commitment negatively if they do not want to work full-time? I believe most founders do. If yes, how much is that based on your personal situation (maybe you have no kids, maybe you are 25, maybe you are just so passionate about your idea and your org)? Do you really need the experienced professional you might hire to have the same degree of commitment and self-sacrifice that you have? Sometimes it's helpful to lose the "idealist" mindset and focus on "I need a way to deal with specific tasks efficiently" and accept that this doesn't need to come with an all-or-nothing commitment to your start-up. Do you believe that by offering full-time employment, you are making your o