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Guide
Hire, outsource, or borrow
This gets decided on monthly cost, which is the least useful basis. Search time, ramp and the cost of getting it wrong matter more, and none of them appear on the salary line.
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- Search
- Three to six months
- Ramp
- Three to six months more
- Mis-hire cost
- Roughly a year
- Fractional exit
- At notice
The comparison nobody runs
Time from the decision, not from the start date. A fractional arrangement is productive inside a month. A permanent hire, counting the search and the ramp, is most of a year.
That gap is the real cost and it never appears in the salary comparison. For a company that needs marketing working this quarter, ten months of nothing is the expensive option regardless of the monthly figure.
The other thing the salary line hides is exit. A fractional arrangement that is wrong ends at notice. A hire that is wrong costs about a year and a good deal of internal goodwill.
The mis-hire risk is the real number
Pune has a deep pool of marketing communications and digital talent and a much thinner one of people who have owned a commercial number in an industrial business and worked alongside a technical sales team. The impressive CV is frequently impressive at something you do not need.
Under-levelling to save cost produces the same failure differently. A mid-level hire in a role requiring senior judgement executes competently and escalates every decision to a promoter with no time, which reproduces the original problem at extra expense.
The practical value of a fractional arrangement is often not the work. It is that after six months you can write the role specification from experience rather than from a template.
Before you ask
When should we hire permanently?
When you can describe precisely what the person does in their first six months, when the work is continuous rather than project shaped, when there is a team or vendor set to lead, and when revenue supports the cost without forcing short-term activity.
Can we do both?
Briefly, during handover. As a standing arrangement it undermines the permanent leader's authority, and if they need that much support the hire was wrong.
What does a marketing head cost in Pune?
It varies enough by sector and seniority that a general figure would mislead. Benchmark at the point of hiring. What is worth saying is that under-paying for this specific role is a false economy, because the gap between competent and excellent shows up directly in pipeline.
Talk it through before you post the role
Twenty minutes. Describe what you want the person to do and I will tell you honestly whether it is a hire, a project, or a fractional arrangement. Sometimes it is a hire and I say so.
Talk it through before you post the role See case studies
Kunal Waghmare · Padmavati Hills, Mokai Vasti, Bavdhan, Pune, Maharashtra 411021
office@quiamo.com · +91 90216 02686