Refer to introductory meme:
James Campbell
I build GTM teams that out-perform | Passionate about Alternative Assets and Investment Technology | Know a thing or three about recruitment.
Opening Note: Hello and welcome dear readers, I hope you have been well since my last edition. Some of you may have noticed that it's been a while since I posted my last newsletter. For that, I apologized. It became apparent to me in my last issue that the recruitment ecosystem doesn't evolve rapidly enough for Bi-weekly updates on the macro of it all.
Tie that in with it being summer, which is a notoriously slow time of year for recruitment, and the quality just wasn't there. I would rather publish less often but provide the maximum amount of value, as opposed to a tight schedule for the sake of it. With that said, this Newsletter will now be released Monthly.
Intro: We're back baby (For some reason I can't underline anymore?!!!)
Summer, even in a strong labour market, is always a slow time of year. The people in charge of hiring are typically leadership, who usually have families and, with that, are taking vacation while their kids are off. Then when you factor in they're all doing this, typically at different times, you get a bit of a bottleneck.
What goes down must come up, however. Which means that typically end of August and start of September is when a lot of searches begin to happen. People realize how much they hate their job after taking time off, so they leave, which creates need. Leaders realize how burnt out they are and how much they need more people, which creates more need.
Finally, you have a large portion of teams that had recruitment budget but have been putting off using it, and now they're coming in to Q4 and their business head is telling them to spend it or they won't get it next year. Volatility, need, urgency, and budget. The perfect conditions for a buoyant recruitment market.
How things have changed over the Summer:
Overall the market hasn't changed too much mechanically since my last edition. Salaries and wages have mostly remained stable from their dip at the start of the year, processes remain longer than they were the last few years, and firms are still mostly in the driving seat.
However, I would say that the two sides of the recruitment flow (Hiring firm and Candidate) are finally at a firm understanding of where the markets at. Candidate's have accepted that they no longer can work from anywhere and get paid Tier 1 city comp, firms have accepted that they need some flexibility when hiring to get the best people.
From a macro view of the market in terms of skill needs, the majority of this year has been pivotal hires only. With that, I mean roles that the business would struggle in a day to day without hiring immediately. These were positions like engineering, infrastructure, and Sales. Engineering and Infra because you can't be a tech company without Tech, and tech that works. Sales because a good salesperson is never not worth the money and in a trickier economic climate they are worth their weight in gold.
For the last part of the year, I see it being more strategic and forward looking. Firms have made their pivotal hires, they have built their tech up and have new clients in late stages of the sales cycle, now with that they need people who can help build the features the salesperson said was on the roadmap, they also need people who can actually implement the software properly once the deal is closed, along with marketers who can help build presence now that logo's are being acquired and the balance sheet is in a strong place.
So I see hiring in Product, Implementation, and Marketing picking up the side of the year, which has been a slow market all things considered for far this year.
The Current landscape of Product Hiring:
If you're in Product and looking for a new role, it's not enough to have just worked cross-functionally, extract requirements and make a few roadmaps. The Product market had gotten INCREDIBLY murky over the last couple of years. Everyone wanted to be one, and a lot of them were paid about 30-40% higher than they had any right to be.
I'm reminded of the swaths of TikToks last year from junior PMs in MAANG companies making 200k to go to adult daycare all day and drink Kombucha. See below:
Product as a principle is about creating revenue opportunity through the better commercialization or efficiency of a technology platform. That's it's whole purpose, to productize something better to make the firm more money.
If you can't show the ROI on what you deliver be being in the product function, then you're probably not going to get hired. You're sure as hell not going to get hired on a $200,000 base salary.
The reality is the PM market had become inflated, and they weren't generating nearly enough value, or providing nearly enough expertise to justify the money they were asking for or were making.
Product people should essentially be mini-executives, they should have the gravitas, intelligence, and strategic insights to make up for their like of hard quantitative skillsets. This is not the case for many, which is why many are currently out of work.
Some advice then for the resume and the interview:
1) If you have more than 2-3 years experience, have numbers and percentages on your resume to quantify return. Money saved, deals won, churn avoided etc.
2) Show you have experience across the full cycle of a product, from napkin to platform. Exhibit your expertise across each iteration of the products lifecycle.
3) Ask commercially minded questions in the interview, actually intelligent ones that show you care and are passionate about the space.
4) When discussing your firm or your experience, explain it from multiple levels, and explain what you're doing as you do it. "So, the Harrington Starr Group as a business is a multi-national recruitment advisory business, these are the stripes we have in the Group (X, Y, Z). I'm in X team, and I fulfill X role in this team, and what this means is.."
5) Again, you're a commercial asset. Start acting like it. Most Product orgs fall under Go-To-Market functions for a reason.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Firms that have caught my eye recently:
OptimX Markets
"OptimX Markets forges a new dynamic in institutional trading by restoring transparency and simplicity to sourcing liquidity. Committed to preserving the fragile ecosystem between brokers and institutional investors in financial transactions, OptimX believes that great technology should enhance relationships rather than replace them, ensuring a seamless experience for both consumers and providers of liquidity. OptimX offers unique and comprehensive trading solutions in both US and EMEA capital markets."
I find these firms are the ones that generally have a lot of staying power as they provide a solution to really annoying problems. This annoyance? Finding clear and quick liquidity for large Equity transactions.
Really strong leadership team from strong execution and electronic trading houses, along with some newly raised Seed capital from Deutsche Borse, this is one to watch.
Injective Labs
"Injective Labs is a core contributor to Injective, the blockchain built for finance. Injective is an open, interoperable network that uniquely provides solutions for DeFi developers. Cosmos IBC and Ethereum compatible, Injective is a hub for dApps shaping the future of finance. Applications built on top of Injective enjoy zero gas fees, secure transactions, and fast transmissions for dynamic scalability."
Again, an infrastructure play that makes things easier to. It's quite a technical/sophisticated product so my understanding is rudimentary. However, from what I can tell it's essentially a developer platform to build and scale your own trading platforms (in a modular fashion) on Web3 (Read: Decentralized) Technology.
Very strong leadership, along with some stellar backers. Intrigued to see where it goes from here.
Adaptive Financial Consulting
"Adaptive was founded in 2012 to solve challenging business problems, leverage the latest technology, and work with clients in a professional and collaborative environment. We partner with capital and commodity market participants that value differentiation through technology. Our experienced teams design and deliver complex solutions, using our proven accelerators, creating long-term competitive advantage for our clients."
Really interesting firm, who also have ownership of trading platform Aeron which is a low latency trading/messaging platform for capital markets.
Their team has been behind some of the most well-renowned proprietary trading systems in the industry. They have a great brand, great leadership, and have managed to sustain a growth heavy period without much restructuring following what has been a tricky time for many consultancies.
Conclusion
Overall, there are strong signs that the market is picking back up, especially within forward looking hires such as Product, Marketing, and Implementation.
As noted above, similar to the original pandemic lull, many firms immediately turtled and went into survival mode to make sure they could navigate waters no matter how poor the outlook became.
However, as is often the case, the world generally tends to continue spinning and things are rarely as bad (or as good) as they would seem.
Starting to see much more arise in the way of funding, all that dry powder has to go somewhere and PE/VC's are under pressure from their LP's to find opportunities as there is plenty of growth and money still being made. Risk off is becoming less and less acceptable of an answer.
That said, we definitely aren't out of the woods yet and we likely won't be seeing a run like the last couple of years again for a while. It's still a very tricky and competitive market, so if you're in a process, or about to be considered, really go the extra mile.
Cheers,
James