Global Talent #55

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

🔥 Opening Shot

There are three quick ways to get people you do not currently have. Import them. Rent them as contractors. Or squeeze more out of the team you already employ. All three got harder in the last six weeks.

Importing them is now a lottery inside a lottery. The $100,000 H-1B fee was ruled unlawful by one court in June, kept alive by a stay pending appeal, upheld by a different court in a different case, and expires on September 21 unless somebody extends it. I cannot plan a hiring year around that. Neither can you.

Renting them just got riskier in one of the best build markets in Europe. Since July 8, a Polish labour inspector can convert a contractor into an employee by administrative decision. No court case first.

And squeezing the team you have is nearly finished. American businesses grew output 2.5 percent last year on 0.2 percent more hours. The slack is gone.

Which leaves the option nobody calls quick. Pick a country where the work can actually be done, employ people properly there, and run the thing. Highest floor, worst sales pitch, because it asks for structure and it asks for patience.

When every shortcut closes at once, that is not bad luck. That is the market telling you the shortcut was never the strategy.

This Week's Number: 30% to 56% — the share of fee-subject H-1B registrations that employers would still be willing to pay $100,000 for, per the Penn Wharton Budget Model (August 3, 2026).

📌 On the Radar

1. The $100,000 visa fee is not really a price. It is a filter.
The Penn Wharton Budget Model published its analysis of the fee and the new wage-weighted lottery on August 3. The payment applies to petitions for workers outside the United States, about 60% of registrations, and PWBM estimates employers would be willing to pay it for only 30% to 56% of them, meaning 44% to 70% never reach the lottery at all. Selections shift accordingly: workers with no prior U.S. visa fall from 44.5% of picks to between 26.1% and 33.9%, while former students already in the country and intracompany transferees gain ground.

You do not need a view on immigration policy to act on this. You need to notice that a route you used to control is now controlled by other people, and that the legal position is genuinely unresolved: a Massachusetts federal court vacated the implementing policy in June, that vacatur is itself stayed pending appeal, a different court upheld the underlying proclamation, and the restriction lapses on September 21 absent extension. If your plan for a hard-to-fill role has ever contained the words "and then we bring them over," that sentence now carries a coin flip and a court docket. The fix is a second route that does not depend on anyone's ruling.

2. In Poland, an inspector can now turn your contractor into your employee without a judge.
Since July 8, 2026, Poland's State Labour Inspectorate can issue an administrative decision converting an improperly structured civil-law or B2B contract into an employment contract, under a reform the Ministry of Family, Labour and Social Policy describes here. The test itself is not new: Article 22 of the Polish Labour Code has said since 2002 that the substance of an arrangement beats the label on it. What is new is that an inspector no longer needs a court to say so. Employers can appeal, and there is a 12-month window to July 8, 2027 to convert arrangements voluntarily. The number that should worry a CFO is not the fine. It is the back social-security contributions and tax.

Poland is one of the best places in Europe to build a team, which is precisely why this matters. The contractor-invoice model has been the default way for a US or UK company to put ten people in Kraków without setting anything up, and it was always a structure with a hole in it. Someone just handed the inspector a faster way to find it. This is not an argument against starting light: getting people legally employed on day one through a partner is the correct first move in any market, and the one I would still recommend. It is an argument that employment is where the obligation begins, not where it ends. Somebody has to run the contracts, the pay bands, and the records in-country, before an inspector runs them for you.

3. American output grew 2.5% last year. Hours grew 0.2%.
The BLS reported on August 11 that nonfarm business productivity rose 2.2% from the second quarter of 2025 to the second quarter of 2026, as output climbed 2.5% while hours worked rose just 0.2%. Hourly compensation was up 3.7%, but real hourly compensation fell 0.1% once inflation came out. Manufacturing fared worse: productivity up 0.9%, unit labor costs up 3.5%.

This is the most under-read number of the month. Companies delivered a full year of growth without adding hours, which is a compliment and a warning in one line: the easy capacity has been spent. Everything past this point costs headcount, and headcount now costs 3.7% more per hour for a workforce that, in real terms, did not get a raise and knows it. No slack at home, no felt raise for the people carrying the load, no reliable import route. That is the combination under which a management team stops debating whether to build somewhere else and starts asking where.

📊 Chart of the Week

Caption: Share of selected H-1B registrants with no prior U.S. visa, under the old random lottery versus the $100,000 fee plus the new wage-weighted lottery. Source: Penn Wharton Budget Model, August 3, 2026, simulated on FY2024 registration data at current prevailing wages.

The two right-hand bars are the same policy under two assumptions about how much of the fee an employer recovers through payroll. Either way the direction holds: the share of selections going to people not already inside the United States falls by 11 to 18 points. The candidate already here gets scarcer and more expensive at once. The candidate abroad becomes a different question altogether, no longer "how do we move them here" but "what would it take to build a proper team where they already live."

🚀 One More Thing

If your talent routes now depend on a court, an inspector, or a workforce with no slack left in it, the remaining one deserves a serious hour. Book a strategy session and we will go through it properly: which roles genuinely have to sit where they sit, which markets can carry the ones that do not, and what the fully loaded cost and the compliance floor really look like once you stop guessing. 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.