As the 2024/25 financial year draws to a close, early signs of recovery are emerging in the executive recruitment market. This follows a prolonged period of subdued activity over the past 18 months, marking the low point of the market’s cyclical downturn. While conditions still largely favour employers—except in niche or highly specialised areas—the tide is beginning to turn.
The US Presidential campaign and President Trump’s initial 100 days have noticeably influenced corporate sentiment in Australia. Corporate confidence remains a fundamental driver of the broader recruitment market, even as various other factors shape industries and organisations. Fortunately, Australia’s strong federal government majority continues to provide stability, enabling businesses to plan with greater certainty and mitigate concerns related to US policy developments. Having successfully guided Perceptor through the dot-com crash, 9/11, SARS, the GFC, and Covid, we understand that corporate momentum is rarely halted for long. We anticipate similar resilience in response to Trump’s tariff agenda—business will move forward.
If only we were all martech sales professionals. They’ve certainly contributed to the marketing and digital sectors’ growing disillusionment with martech, digital media, and the overwhelming data glut of 2025. Organisations are still struggling to realise value from their martech and digital investments, driving strong demand for talent who can translate tech into results—not just promises. The focus is shifting from expansion to optimisation, with ROI and efficiency taking precedence over shiny new platforms. We expect this trend to build into 2025/26 as companies seek individuals who can bridge strategy and execution. And if history’s any guide, the AI hangover will echo this in five years—marked by inflated expectations, underwhelming outcomes, and renewed calls for practical implementation.
At Perceptor, our focus spans leadership appointments across ‘Customer’ functions—Sales, Digital, and Marketing—as well as Technology and General Management. Over the past 12 months, we’ve observed that, while these domains differ, the core leadership challenges remain strikingly consistent. They typically centre on building capability across people, processes, and technology, while navigating uncertainty and ambiguity—all with a clear mandate for growth or the turnaround of underperforming functions. These are the themes shaping organisational priorities today and, consequently, the issues candidates must be prepared to address in interviews.
Our research across sectors and company sizes indicates that salary increases are generally tracking around the 3% mark. There is some flexibility to account for performance—both strong and weak—as well as for in-demand specialist skills or acute talent shortages, such as in martech.
Rather than inflating base salaries, well-performing organisations are opting to recognise and retain talent through bonus structures and performance-linked incentives.
The early months of 2025 have seen a notable shift, with companies across all sizes increasingly mandating in-office attendance or raising their minimum expectations. We’ve observed more clients implementing four- and five-day office-based policies than at any point since January 2020—a clear departure from the flexibility norms of recent years.
We anticipate this trend will gain further momentum through 2025/26. Ongoing business transformation and a relatively competitive recruitment market are creating the conditions for organisations to reinforce office-first models with greater confidence and less pushback.
The key question for leaders is how to balance the individual productivity benefits of remote work with the collective gains of in-person collaboration. As teams navigate this shift, the emphasis will be on aligning workplace strategy with overall business performance and long-term culture-building.
Rather than recycle the waves of content being written about Ai we thought we’d share what we are seeing organisations do on the ground here in Australia.
Firstly, we believe the early uses of Ai are to drive both efficiency and effectiveness. There are clearly some large enterprises leading the way with major investments in this area. Telstra and CBA are probably the best examples with Telstra announcing a $700m joint venture investment with Accenture in Ai technology and CBA being in the global top 5 banks for Ai maturity. Both of these businesses have massive data pools, massive marketing and media footprints, significant contact centres and ongoing opportunities around customer experience and risk management, so this makes them the perfect organisation to leverage Ai to drive both efficiency and effectiveness.
We are seeing organisations take different approaches in “how they think about how to think about Ai”. For example, some organisations are taking a practical, bottom up approach where they are looking at each role or function and try to understand which elements can be done or improved by Ai. This approach is a slow burn approach but is lower risk.
Others are asking what is the definition of Ai within the context of their organisation, and, where they think it will have the most impact in the value chain. This means they are testing in some areas of a function, for example, the media or content team within a marketing team or, the whole marketing function.
We are also seeing many small or scale up businesses use Ai tools as they build the structure of their business. This is the benefit of no, or very little legacy systems or tech debt. The exciting piece about this end of the market is that for the first time ever a small business can access the same technology capabilities as a large enterprise.
As of June 2025, we have not seen any briefs which are dedicated Ai hires. This is similar to the very early years of digital/ecommerce when companies utilised existing people to add digital elements to their role or to be the early internal appointment as the digital specialist. We suspect the latter will happen to a certain extent but since it already seems Ai as a tool will be ubiquitous it is more likely every role will have a “leverage the benefits of Ai” added to their responsibilities.
We are certainly in a number of discussions with clients on how their organisational structure of the future could be shaped, however, the conversation often leads back to the question of how and where in their organisation they intend to adopt it first and most significantly.