Global Talent #54

Brought to you by Lundi: we design, hire, and run international teams.

🔥 Opening Shot

The July jobs report came out Friday and the number was negative. The US shed 23,000 jobs. Most executives will read that as a demand signal: slow down, freeze the requisitions, wait for clarity.

I read a different line in the same release. Labor force participation is down to 61.4 percent, off 0.7 points just since January. The pool is not just calm. It is draining.

In my book I borrowed a concept from startup land and applied it to hiring: TAM, the total addressable market, except the asset is people. Hire only in your home market and your TAM is roughly 100 million knowledge workers. Hire wherever the work can actually be done and it is closer to a billion. Every constraint you add, one country, one commute radius, one legal setup you already have, shrinks that number. Most companies run with the smallest possible denominator and then wonder why every hire is a bidding war.

Here is what a stalling domestic market actually changes: the bidding war gets worse, not better. Fewer people entering the pool means the ones in it cost more to pry loose. A hiring freeze does not fix that. It just pauses your growth while your competitors decide where their next ten roles should live.

Talent is everywhere. Opportunity is not. A shrinking home market is your cue to grow the denominator.

This Week's Number: –23,000 — July's change in US nonfarm payrolls, against an average gain of just 34,000 a month over the prior year (BLS, August 7, 2026).

📌 On the Radar

1. The US hiring engine stalled, and the revisions say it stalled months ago.
The July Employment Situation from the BLS shows payrolls down 23,000, following an average monthly gain of 34,000 over the prior 12 months. The sharper story is in the fine print: May was revised down from +129,000 to +63,000 and June from +57,000 to +20,000, so 103,000 jobs you read about this summer turned out not to exist. Wage growth is running 3.2% a year, and participation has fallen to 61.4%, the lowest level in over five years.

If you plan capacity off the first print, you are planning off a draft. The real numbers arrive two months later, and lately they arrive smaller. But the deeper issue is the supply side. When participation falls in your only hiring market, every growth plan quietly becomes a poaching plan, and poaching is the most expensive way to build a team. The companies I see growing through this are not out-bidding anyone. They are choosing markets where the talent pool is deepening rather than draining, and building there with proper structure.

2. AI has led US layoff reasons for five straight months. Hiring went up anyway.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that July job cuts fell to 33,429, the lowest monthly total in two years, while AI was the leading stated reason for the fifth consecutive month at 10,970 cuts. Tech has announced 149,023 cuts this year, up 67%, and now accounts for 31% of all US reductions. Yet announced hiring plans are up 25% year to date, the strongest January-to-July total since 2023. As Andy Challenger put it, AI "is shifting the labor market, it is not dismantling it."

This is churn, not collapse, and churn is an org-design problem. The roles being cut and the roles being added are not the same roles, and increasingly they are not in the same places: Challenger notes the hiring demand is showing up in work "that happens on a floor rather than a screen." The question that matters for a COO is not how many seats AI removes. It is which capabilities you need next, and where those capabilities are actually available at depth. Answer the what and the where together, or you will restructure twice.

3. Europe's pay transparency rules are live. Most countries haven't finished writing them.
The EU's pay transparency rules are now taking effect, per the European Commission: employers must publish salary ranges for candidates, can no longer ask about pay history, must disclose pay levels on request, and employers with 100+ staff must report their gender pay gap, with a mandatory pay assessment wherever an unjustified gap hits 5%. The transposition deadline passed on June 7, and by most trackers' count only four member states met it, so the obligations are landing country by country as national laws catch up.

If you run a 20-person team in Poland or Spain from New York or London, this is now your problem, on a timeline you do not control. The obligations attach to whoever holds the employment relationship, but the work of complying, pay bands, job architecture, comparable-work analysis, is operating work, and it lands on you either way. An employment partner gets you legally employed on day one, and that is the right way to start. Running a coherent pay structure across three countries as the rules shift underneath you is the other half of the job. Someone has to own it, in-country, before the reporting deadline owns you.

📊 Chart of the Week

Caption: US nonfarm payrolls, first-reported vs. revised monthly change, May–July 2026. Source: BLS Employment Situation, released August 7, 2026.

May was reported at +129,000 and is now +63,000. June was reported at +57,000 and is now +20,000. July's first print is –23,000, and the pattern suggests the final number will not be kinder. A preliminary benchmark revision arrives August 28. If your board deck quotes the headline jobs number, it is quoting a draft, and lately the drafts run optimistic. Plan capacity on what the labor market actually is, not on what the first print said it was.

🚀 One More Thing

If your growth plan assumes the market that produced last year's hires will produce next year's, it deserves a second look. Book a strategy session and we will map it out: which roles genuinely need to sit where they sit, where the talent pools are deepening rather than draining, and what the fully loaded numbers look like. No pitch. Just insight from someone who has been there.

📖 New here? My book, Winning the Global Talent War, is the full playbook behind this newsletter.