🌍 Location: Remote / Hybrid - Brussels, Belgium
🕐 October 2026 to June 2027 | 1 to 3 days per month | Freelance
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
Nice-to-have
Not the Right Role If
What We Offer
Interested? Send us a short note on the closest situation you have handled to ours: what you did, and how it ended.
HR Performance Consultant
Ayming
Tender Specialist and Business Support – Dutch & French Speaker
Agilent
Senior Account Executive, Customer Base
Workday
Presales Solution Architect – Defense Center
Orange Cyberdefense
SSA Senior Engineer
Westinghousenuclear
Cost Manager
AECOM