Global Talent #59

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

🔥 Opening Shot

We have the answer. On Tuesday the ONS reported 702,000 vacancies, the lowest outside the pandemic since 2014. Payrolled employees are down 145,000 on the year. And in the statisticians' own words, smaller firms may not be recruiting because of increases in labour costs. Businesses with fewer than ten staff have cut their vacancies by nearly a quarter in twelve months.

Nobody stopped needing people. They stopped being able to afford the seat.

That distinction is the whole game. A person is a salary. A seat is a salary, plus the employer taxes, plus the rulebook, plus the manager who runs it. Britain raised the employer taxes in April 2025 and moved the wage floor twice. The smallest employers, the ones with no room to absorb it, did the only thing available to them. They stopped buying seats.

Every government writes the terms of a seat. This week three of them did it at once. Britain raised the price. Vietnam put enforcement on rails, with fines that scale by headcount. Ukraine spelled out what it takes to keep a tech team stable: three times the minimum wage per head, a real entity, nine people or more.

I have run teams under rulebooks like these, and I can tell you the mistake people make. They read the salary line and stop.

The lesson is not that hiring abroad is cheaper. Sometimes it is not. The lesson is that the price of a seat is set by governments, and the return on a seat is set by whoever runs it. Read both before you pick the map.

This Week's Number: 23.5% — how far vacancies fell in a year at Britain's smallest employers (1 to 9 staff), against 4.9% for the economy as a whole.

📌 On the Radar

1. UK vacancies hit a 2014 low, and the ONS names the reason: labour costs.
The ONS vacancies release for June to August shows 702,000 open roles, down 36,000 on the year. The fall is not evenly spread. Firms with 1 to 9 employees have cut vacancies by 28,000, or 23.5%, in twelve months, to the lowest level since the winter of 2013. Firms with 10 to 49 staff are down 10.1%. The ONS adds, plainly, that feedback from its survey suggests smaller firms may not be recruiting because of increases in labour costs.

Read this as a demand story and you will get the wrong answer. Demand for a good finance analyst in Leeds did not fall 23% in a year. The all-in cost of employing one in Leeds went up, and a company with eight people cannot pass that on. The mid-market has one lever the small firm does not: it can put the seat somewhere else. A UK company that needs ten more people this year does not have a hiring problem. It has a location decision it has not made yet. The companies getting this right pick one market, employ people properly through a partner from day one, and put a manager over the group. The seat gets cheaper; the structure does not get worse.

2. Vietnam put its labour fines on rails, and they scale by headcount.
On September 10, Decree 283/2026 came into force, replacing Vietnam's 2022 penalty regime for labour and social-insurance violations. Employers using staff without valid permits are fined VND 30 to 75 million depending on how many workers are involved (one to ten, eleven to twenty, twenty-one or more), plus VND 5 to 10 million per person placed in a role that does not match the permit. Beyond the money: deportation of the individual, and temporary suspension of the employer's operations. The decree also allows violations to be processed electronically.

A US reader will look at a $2,900 maximum fine and laugh. Wrong read. Three things matter. The fines scale with the size of the team, so the regime is built for companies employing groups. Enforcement is moving onto electronic rails: filings become data the state can see, not paper it has to find. And the sanctions that hurt are not the fines: it is the suspension order, or the manager you sent from Denver being put on a plane. Vietnam is on our shortlist because the talent is real and the rules are knowable. Knowable is not the same as optional. Start with an employment partner on day one; the permits and filings belong with them. But "the person is doing a different job from the one on the permit" is an operating failure, not a payroll failure. Somebody has to actually know what each of your twenty people does. That is the half of the job that employment alone never covered.

3. Ukraine set the price of a stable tech team: 3x the minimum wage, one real entity, nine people.
From September 1, an employer in Ukraine that wants to keep conscription-age staff reserved from mobilisation has to pay each reserved employee at least three times the minimum wage (UAH 25,941 a month), up from 2.5 times. The IT Ukraine Association's guide to the 2026 rules lays out the rest. The employer itself has to hold "critical enterprise" status: no tax debt, average pay above the threshold, and for IT firms outside the Diia City regime, average pay of at least EUR 1,200 and at least nine insured employees. A critical enterprise can reserve up to half its eligible men.

Here is what most buyers miss: the reservation belongs to the employer, not to you. Whoever legally employs your Kyiv engineers is the entity that has to qualify, keep qualifying every quarter, and manage the quota. Nine people on one payroll at a proper company doing real IT work can reach the threshold. Nine people scattered across three contractor arrangements cannot, and the day one of them is called up, you will find out which structure you actually bought. Stability is a property of the structure, not of the individual hire. Concentrate the team, employ it properly, pay it well, and the rulebook works for you. Scatter it and the same rulebook works against you.

📊 Chart of the Week

The economy-wide number (down 4.9%) hides the real story. The smallest employers, the ones with no scale to absorb a higher employer tax bill and a higher wage floor, have cut their hiring by nearly a quarter. This is what a price rise on the seat looks like when the buyer cannot move the seat. A 300-person company can move it.

🚀 One More Thing

If your board is asking why the hiring plan is frozen, or you are weighing a first team in a market like Vietnam or Ukraine and want to know what the seat really costs, all in (tax, rulebook, manager, not just salary), book a strategy session and I will walk you through how we price it. 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.