Fractional People Leadership for Teams Who'd Rather Build Than Firefight.
Helping you build
I build People functions from scratch for technical organizations and mission-driven nonprofits who've outgrown DIY HR.
Services
Services
Founding People Function Build
If you're a small organization with limited or no HR infrastructure, I can build it from the ground up. Compensation bands, performance management, onboarding, and policies, designed to be lightweight enough that a small technical or mission-driven team will actually use them. This is the work I've done three times, having built full People functions with outside HR support.
Manager Development
Many organizations reach a point where individual contributors are managing people without ever being trained to do it. I coach and train first-time managers, often engineers or researchers, through one-on-one coaching, feedback training, and manager cohorts where they can talk honestly about the complexities and challenges of people management.
Employee Relations and Sensitive Situations
I handle investigations, performance improvement plans, terminations, and other high-stakes personnel decisions with discretion, often partnering with outside counsel. This is the work that gets avoided or mishandled without a steady, experienced person in the room, and it's where I spend a lot of my time. How people are treated in these situations has a direct relationship with an organization's retention and internal trust.
Interim or Fractional Head of People
For organizations not ready for a full-time People leader, I can step in on a part-time basis. I've done this for nonprofits and early-stage startups since 2019, including Optopax, Common Counsel Foundation, The Bayard Project, Nourish CA, and Contra Costa County Family Justice Centers.
HR Systems and Infrastructure
HRIS migrations, leveling frameworks, leave and benefits policy, and the operational backbone that keeps a growing organization out of trouble. I have led full People Operations build-outs, including HRIS migrations, leveling frameworks, and 401(k) rollouts.
About Me
I'm Jenny Garcia, a People leader with over twelve years of experience building HR functions from zero. I've been the founding People hire three times, and two of those companies were acquired while I was there. I've led HR teams through business pivots, layoffs, rebuilds, and post-acquisition integration.
Most of my career has been with technical teams. I've built compensation, performance, and onboarding systems from scratch for research scientists, ML engineers, and mathematicians who left large corporations and institutions and were relatively skeptical of conventional HR practices. I've also worked with mission-driven nonprofits navigating complex, multi-entity structures. In both worlds, the job is the same, and that's to build systems that people actively engage with, and be someone leaders can trust with challenging situations and tough calls.
I have a professional coaching background through New Ventures West, which shapes how I work. I sit with managers through the conversations they're dreading, and I help founders and executive directors see what their organization actually needs instead of what a generic HR web site template says it should have.
I also use AI in my own practice, to handle repetitive work like drafting and synthesizing feedback, so more of my time goes to the parts of the job that require real judgment. I wrote CA EnviroVoters' AI usage policy for this reason.
If you're a founder, executive director, or People leader who needs someone who can move between strategy and the ground floor, I'd love to talk.
Results Speak Volumes
I'm committed to delivering exceptional results for my clients. I build long-term relationships with clients and colleagues, and I provide effective strategies and solutions that don't feel like HR bureaucracy or excess process.
Here's what some of them have said:
Jon Su
VP, ML & Software, Syntiant
CEO, Pilot AI
People are everything at a startup, and Jenny ran HR/people operations for us at Pilot AI. We had a phenomenal team of brilliant and creative individuals, being a deep-tech company. Jenny was the reason that group stayed focused and motivated towards our goals, both during the good times, but more importantly during the tough times that all startups go through. That takes a tremendous amount of empathy, compassion, and experience, and I could not recommend anybody more to help a leader extract the best out of their team than Jenny.
Alex Song
Director of Product Management, Playstation
Director of Engineering, Lytro
As Louis Gerstner from IBM once stated, “... culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.”
Jenny fosters a warm, team first, hard-working, respectful, honest, dignified, and passionate workplace culture that cannot easily be replicated.
She supported me and my team on everything - compensation, benefits, employee relations, engagement as well as difficult personnel situations. And while it seems like a full plate, never did I feel she neglected one in place of another. Jenny was able to address and anticipate everyone's needs, concerns and expectations with the same level of devotion.
Jenny is an effective leader in every sense of the word, keeping the necessary balance between maintaining firm standards, but also leading with empathy and compassion.
Samuel Adesoye
Research Scientist, Syntiant
Jenny was pivotal to my transition to a management position. She consistently helped improve my interpersonal skills to ensure my team functioned fluidly. Jenny was so good at ensuring everyone at the company had their needs met. She organized events, review processes, and continuous check-ins to help improve our day-to-day functions.
I strongly recommend Jenny to any organization on any scale.