Friends,

The tumultuous times of the tech industry are showing no signs of slowing.

This week, it was Canva with a 22% workforce reduction, and Heidi with 18%, giving the Aus scene it’s biggest taste of the job impacts facing the industry at large.

It prompted me to write about the raw reality facing employers and employees. And both are relevant to us as People professionals.

On the one hand, we’re charged with helping companies be as highly performant as possible, with as few people as possible.

On the other, our profession has faced some of the most intense impacts, and so our focus should also be on how we enable ourselves to weather storms like this, through networking, professional development, and even side hustling.

To that end, those who subscribed to How to Become a HR Consultant will notice I went a bit silent on posting. This year has been a little ✨manic✨ (to put it mildly), and something had to give, but I’m deep into 2027 planning and intending on bringing it back in force as a resource for people professionals interested in how they can chart their own course in solopreneurialism (it’s a word, don’t @ me).

Enjoy this week’s edition ✌️

Matt

In case you’re new here (or just missed it) here’s the past three editions of the FNDN Series:

Leaders will ask how your plan compares to peer companies.

Pave and Alpine Rewards asked compensation and total rewards leaders how they’re planning for 2027, from merit and promotion budgets to AI talent premiums to how much of the pay range shows up on job postings.

Whether you’re defending a budget, building a pay-for-performance strategy, or deciding how much of your ranges to publish, you’ll find the market context you need.

See where you stand and enter planning season with data you can defend.

Thank you for supporting our sponsors, who keep this publication free.

Know a startup Head of People looking for answers 🙋 why not forward this to them for some instant karma? ✨

Leapsome has just launched Leapsome Recruiting. I'm partnering with them for this edition to share what leading companies are doing as the bar for great talent keeps rising, and ensure your bar for hiring keeps rising with it.

Let me start today’s edition by saying that I find baseball boring (sorry not sorry).

But regardless of what you (or I) think of baseball, a quintessential watch for People professionals is Moneyball (which, btw, isn’t boring).

Moneyball dramatises how the 2002 Oakland A's stopped picking players on things like 'looks' (yes, really) and started picking them on the stats that actually predicted winning. With about a third of the Yankees' payroll, they won just as many games. Talk about talent density.

Then everyone copied them, and what made Oakland exceptional in 2002 was the baseline by 2004.

Lately, Moneyball has been playing out in businesses everywhere I look.

What once passed as great is now barely meeting the standard. And it keeps coming up.

In a recent edition of this publication, I shared my conversation with Zapier’s VP of Global Talent, Tracy St.Dic, about how when they set a minimum AI fluency bar for every new hire, they called it "capable".

A year later, they raised it: if AI isn't meaningfully improving your work, you don't meet the bar. What passed as capable last year now sits below it.

I've heard versions of the same story from People leaders ever since.

The bar for excellence is moving, but interview scorecards haven't moved with it.

One of the latest looks at this comes from Anthropic, who published research on how hiring and work have changed inside their own company last month.

In 2024, around one in 20 of their technical interview scorecards mentioned a candidate's track record with AI tools. That share has since tripled, and for non-technical roles it's quadrupled. For technical roles, the assessment traits gaining the most ground are about autonomy and judgement, while domain expertise is reduced. For non-technical roles, mission and customer orientation are up and execution skills are down.

ElevenLabs is seeing the same shift. Victoria Weller, who leads operations there, told me that with AI taking on the repeat work, "what really remains are the things like judgment and taste and speed", and that raises the bar for ‘meets expectations’. (Our full conversation comes out later this month.)

Anthropic, ElevenLabs and Zapier are three companies, not a whole market. But they're early often enough that it's worth asking how long until your team is having the same conversation.

For most teams, the immediate problem is simpler. If your scorecards haven't been touched since 2024, they're testing for what you thought good looked like in 2024.

Most companies already have the evidence for where their bar sits now. It's in how their best people work.

You know who your top performers are. You've rated and calibrated them, and probably fought to keep a few. But little of that reaches the next hire. I’ve been there. The hiring manager writes the scorecard from a job description that was copied from the last one, and nobody goes back to ask the people doing the job well. It also doesn't help that the interview usually runs in one tool, while the performance data sits in another.

Zapier's fix was to go to the source. The steps translate to any company:

After someone's hired, ElevenLabs keeps measuring against the same moving bar. Every review asks leads whether they'd hire that person again, and the bar for 'meets expectations' keeps rising, so someone who hasn't grown in six months is slipping, even if they were at the bar last time.

The question in the review and the question in the interview are the same question.

Neither company stopped at defining the standard. Zapier rebuilt its rubric as AI use moved on, and ElevenLabs measures its people against a rising bar every review cycle. In both, the profile they hire for describes how their best people work, like how they use their judgement and how they use AI, and the system around it keeps that profile current.

Most teams don't have the headcount to run that system by hand, which is fine, because now you don’t need to.

Constantly lifting the bar like this takes a lot of discipline. That's doable, but it's also constant upkeep. 

Every time the review template changes, someone has to remember to change the scorecard too, and at most startups that someone is the People team.

It's much easier when both sides are integrated. That's the idea behind Leapsome Recruiting. 

It runs hiring on the same employee record as your performance and pay data, so:

The comp person in me loves the band checks most. 

In my experience, offers made outside the band are one of the main places pay equity breaks down, and it's far cheaper to stop them at the offer than to fix them in your next pay review.

Leapsome runs its own hiring on it, and VP of People Strategy Jessie Zwaan says the team was "able to move from our legacy ATS to Leapsome within two weeks with a team of two", and that they now "see a consistent thread between competencies and skills, and interview feedback". 

Kittl, one of their early customers, said adding it "made hiring much easier for a team our size."

The bar for a strong hire is moving faster than the job descriptions used to hire against.

The people who know where it's moved to are already on your team, and ensuring what you interview for is the same as what you review your people against keeps your bar moving for the whole company.

So I'll leave you with one question.

If your best performer applied for their own role today, would your current scorecard recognise them, or does it need to be raised?

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe.

A roundup of the most interesting stuff from the week:

When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help you:

1. Tools & resources
Resources and tools that give you what you need to build your own startup compensation practices.

2. Comp consulting
Building startup compensation practices that are clear, fair and competitive.

3. Startup People Summit
A 1-day annual event for People professionals in scaling companies. Creating the playbook for startup people practices. Grab recordings from past events, or subscribe to join the next summit.