Ciao friends,

I’m writing this on a train from Turin (in the Piedmont region) to Lucca (in the Tuscan region) of Italy.

This is my fourth train trip since arriving in Europe and I’ve loved the slow travel. It’s such an amazing way to see the countryside and, in a trip that also includes 10 flights 😬 is a bit nicer on the environment too. It’s Something I wish we had more of in Australia.

Although I’m in Lucca for the coming week, I’m excited to be in London for 1 night of it, and to meet many of you who are joining me for the event with DreamTeam. I can’t wait to see you all.

Enjoy this weeks edition ✌️

Matt

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The most interesting content I’ve come across in the past month, and reflections on what they mean for the modern Head of People.

The macro-economic environment seems to be turning in favour of Australia, and the APAC region generally, as they witness a surge in hiring. European red-tape and $100k visa’s no doubt but a few of the things driving the region as a focal point, which conversely, is making big moves of it’s own. And startups are benefitting not only from deep talent pools, but a nice discount to their US and European counterparts. A great deep dive into how Ravio’s data is illustrating a shift in the regional salary market. If you employ people in the region, put the kettle on and settle in for this one.

Say what you will of Cluely, what I found interesting about this piece was the founder’s commentary on traditional startup pay (low cash, high equity), and how they’re inverting the model. In startups today, equity is seen as riskier, and loyalty is eroding. This is driving pay into the limelight as a key driver of attraction and retention. With AI enablement we’ll no doubt continue to see the trend of hiring fewer, but higher capability hires, which startups can afford to do at a higher price point. Let me know if you’re taking this approach yourself, or seeing it across the market.

What hit me squarely in the face with this post from Greg (follow him if you don’t already) wasn’t what his post originally intended. Yes, solopreneurs have all the tools they need to produce more and better things faster and cheaper than established companies do. But startup People teams are the solopreneurs of the tech industry. In my experience, startups have fewer guardrails on things like procurement, IT and so on, that means we can often bring these tools in on a whim to at least test. Then, they give us enormous capability to build out impactful programs in a fraction of the time/cost, with all the same impact as what established people teams in big corporates do with much larger more specialised teams. The time for startup People teams to build is now.

If you’re as overwhelmed by AI as I am on a constant basis, then you’ll appreciate the step-by-step overview with which this piece outlines ‘how to become an AI fluent organisation’. With AI-enablement increasingly becoming a key part of the People team’s agenda, it’s important to understand what you’re actually trying to do, evaluate the current state, and plot a roadmap to get where you want to go. It’s definitely a much less ‘get in and get your hands dirty’ approach than the piece above suggests, but necessary when you’re handling a workforce that needs to be taken along on the journey rather than the churn and burn approach we continue to hear about.

This piece does a great job unpacking a chart you’ve all no doubt seen by now, pitting the (booming) US S&P 500 against the (flailing) US jobs market. It’s always good to first remember that the US isn’t the world, and that correlation isn’t causation, but it’s hard not to look at this with a bit of disdain as a People professional charged with employing and empowering people in jobs. Companies are richer than ever and yet job opportunities and salaries appear to be declining and flatlining respectively. Unfortunately this is likely to continue to fuel the trends we’re seeing everywhere in compensation data, namely, that AI-linked roles are taking the lions share of pay, while other roles (in a professional tech context) do not. Will the supply of AI talent normalise? We’ll see. My read: tech shocks (historically) cause short-term job losses, but (if demand, retraining and institutions keep up) they usually create more jobs than they destroy.

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

1. Tools & resources
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