The investment business has one structural feature that is rarely talked about openly. The company makes a decision about an asset for 5-7 years. And the person it hires for this asset thinks with a horizon of 12-18 months. This is not a problem of a specific candidate, but a constant tension between the logic of capital and the logic of people.
Reading the labor market in this context is a separate skill.
As HRD of the Octava Group, I see the following real signals:
People have learned to calculate the real price of risk and it turned out to be higher than it seemed.
A few years ago, a person was ready to take risks for the sake of rapid growth. Today, he chooses a clear role, adequate workload and confidence that the company will exist in a year.
Adaptability is more expensive than narrow qualifications.
Planning a year ahead has become a luxury. Therefore, in hiring, I increasingly see a request not for the ideal specialist for a specific function, but for a person who works confidently in a blurred role, takes responsibility without a clear TOR and does not break down when priorities change for the second time in a month. There are few such people. And they have long been in short supply.
Fatigue is no longer an HR topic.
Four years of uncertainty are accumulating. And I see this in the quality of solutions, in the speed of teams’ reactions, in how people react to changes that three years ago would have been perceived as a normal working context. Sustainability has long gone beyond wellbeing programs and has become a question of business operational capacity.
What I would perceive with caution:
Aggregate market statistics. Unemployment rate, “average salary by industry”, general trends – this is the average temperature in the hospital. For a holding with three different business models, it means almost nothing. Sales in a defense project and sales in a service company live in two different markets, which are simply called one word.
Radical predictions about AI. There are many loud statements, practice is more restrained. Roles are transformed, some processes are automated, but the need for people who can make decisions in conditions of incomplete information has not disappeared. On the contrary.
At Octava Capital, I read several labor markets at once – IT, defense and service live according to different logic and under different pressure. This is the regime of additional uncertainty of the investment business: you are not in one market, you are in all of them at once. That is why the question “is it a signal or noise” is more expensive here than anywhere else.