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
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
Strong People infrastructure is the operational backbone that lowers risk for a growing organization. It covers HRIS migrations, leveling frameworks, role design, and leave and benefits policy. It also covers compliant documents such as handbooks, offer letter templates, and required notices. I have led full People Operations build-outs at startups and nonprofits. That work included career pathing, compensation philosophy, pay scales, and 401(k) rollouts and transitions.
About Me
Founders and executive directors often need an HR lead before they can afford to hire one as a full-time employee, and I know how to fill that gap.
I’m Jenny Garcia, a People leader from the San Francisco Bay Area with over twelve years of experience building HR functions from zero. Three organizations hired me as their first People leader, and I’ve led HR teams through business pivots, layoffs, rebuilds, pre-acquisition due diligence, and post-acquisition integration.
Most of my career has been with technical teams. Research scientists, ML engineers, and mathematicians who leave large institutions are often skeptical of conventional HR. Compensation, performance, and onboarding systems for them have to be logical and useful, or they get ignored. Mission-driven nonprofits with complex, multi-entity structures are the other half of my work. In both worlds, the goal is the same. Build systems people actually use and add value, take HR work off of leaders' plates, and be someone they trust with tough calls.
Professional coaching training shapes how I work. I sit with managers through complex situations, and I help founders and executive directors see what their organization needs, not what a standard HR playbook says it should have.
AI handles the repetitive parts of my work, like drafting and synthesizing feedback. That leaves more time for the parts that need real judgment. I also write AI-use policies that non-technical staff can easily follow.
If you’re a founder, executive director, or People leader who needs someone who can move between strategy and the ground floor, let’s talk.
Results Speak Volumes
I'm committed to delivering exceptional results for my clients. I build long-term relationships with clients and colleagues, and 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.