Insights from an ex submarine officer

Speaker A: Foreign. Paradox Podcast. I'm joined by Carrie Sparrow, former Navy submarine officer and founder of Wagescape, to dig into the real war for talent. We explore why pay transparency flipped the rules, how local intelligence is overtaking national trends, and why AI is flooding the market with noise instead of clarity. If you think the talent battle is just about perks and branding, this conversation will change your strategy. Welcome to the Maverick Paradox Podcast, the show for business owners, organizational leaders, and the pathologically curious. I'm Judith Germain, a maverick leadership expert exploring what it really takes to lead in a world that doesn't always make sense. If you're ready to think differently, challenge the status quo, navigate complexity, and drive real impact, you're in the right place.

Speaker B: I would remind people that we're in a different world, uh, when it comes for competing for talent. And there's, you know, both, uh, that creates requirements, uh, that are new but also amazing new opportunities.

Speaker A: And today our guest is Carrie Sparrow. How are you doing?

Speaker B: I'm doing great. How are you?

Speaker A: I am doing awesome, as you guys like to say. Carrie, what's an interesting thing about you?

Speaker B: Uh, I think the thing that people find most intriguing is that I was formerly a submarine officer on nuclear powered submarines, and so I got to do some interesting things on my time serving in the Navy.

Speaker A: Can you name one thing that you've taken away from that, that you think is really useful?

Speaker B: I think that there's an entire ethos around leadership and accountability, uh, that, uh, is engendered in the military in general, and operational units in particular, that, uh, um, I really took away from me and really kind of guides everything that I do and has. I mean, I've been out of the Navy now for 30 years and, uh, I still, uh, live those lessons every single day.

Speaker A: So you have no problem sorting out your bed when you get up in the morning?

Speaker B: No, no, I make the bed every morning. And, uh, you know, and, and if, if my wife is up before me, uh, or she, she, uh, has a chance to do it, she'll make her side of the bed and, uh, as a reminder to make mine.

Speaker A: So there is that great guy. I forgot what his name. Who did that address was. I don't think he was named. I think he might have been army. And he was saying the most important thing you do when you wake up in the morning is to, is to make your bed, because that sets the standard.

Speaker B: Yeah. He is the former commander of all Special Forces, and, uh, he was given a speech at the University of Texas at one of their commencements. And uh, yeah, that speech is a really famous speech. And it lives, you know, it lives with me at a lot of great practical examples that were, uh, entertaining, but also really useful.

Speaker A: M. All right, tell us something else about you. So that was 30 years ago. What's happening now?

Speaker B: Yeah, now I run a company called Wagescape. Uh, it's a very geeky company. Uh, we, uh, uh, we collect and provide data about what's happening in the labor market in an effort to make things like jobs and pay and skills. Who's hiring? What are they hiring for? Who's out there? What skills do they have? A lot more transparent than it has in the past so that, uh, individuals and employees can get, you know, a lot more, you know, make much better decisions about the things that really matter to them. I mean, if you think about it, the labor market touches every single one of us. Every individual, every family, every community, every business, um, every organization, every country, uh, and, um, yet the information about, you know, basic things like pay and hiring and how to develop your skills and so forth is pretty hard to find compared, uh, to other types of information and, uh, to do it reliably. So I founded Wagescape about 10 years ago with an. In an effort to help address that.

Speaker A: Is that, is that a us Only thing?

Speaker B: No, no. Uh, we started, uh, by collecting data in the US we built a data platform that tracked about, you know, over 80% of all the new jobs that were being generated in the US Every day. And we've since expanded that platform to track, uh, jobs in over two, you know, so every country basically in the world, um, in a lot of cases, nearly every new job, in some cases, not quite. Not quite that. But, uh, we continue to work on that. But now we're global in terms of the data that we track. And we track lots of different kinds of data, not just job openings.

Speaker A: Okay, brilliant. Thank you for that. So I understand then. So you really understand how organizations can win the war for talent. Uh, and I'm assuming that's on the attraction of that. Tell me how, how that can be done.

Speaker B: Well, it's interesting you say it's on the attraction. Ever since, you know, largely the pandemic, the focus has expanded significantly on retention because of the whole trend around transparency. Employees now know what's, you know, what's going on in the labor market at least as good as their employers. There's still lots of room for improvement, which is why we're in business. But, uh, um, because of that, especially right after the pandemic, when there was a Period of wage inflation in many countries, uh, you know, here in the US and uh, uh, as a case in point, uh, suddenly companies found themselves where they were underpaying employees compared to what they could be offered in, you know, in other organizations. And, you know, the traditional wisdom had been that, uh, you know, employees don't leave companies because of pay. They leave companies because of culture or bad managers or other things or, you know, career opportunity. But that wasn't true anymore. If you could make an extra 25% from what you're making now, especially when inflation, actual inflation was, you know, was coming up higher than anyone has seen in their entire lives, um, for many people, uh, that's a really big deal. And people were leaving for pay. And companies realized they had to, you know, had to compete on pay just to keep their employees. So now very much the war on talent is both attraction and retention. Um, and the war on talent's being fought out on lots of different fronts. One of the things that's very different now is people who are appreciating, employers are appreciating that the war on talent is very local. Uh, you can't use a picture of what's happening nationally. You can't use a picture of what's happening at a provincial or state level anymore. You've got to really get local and you've got to get specific, uh, to see, you know, who's competing for the talent that you need and, uh, what are they doing to compete for it. Pay is one factor, but there's others as well. You know, other things related to working conditions, um, the degree of remote work or hybrid work, the culture, uh, of the company and so forth. Lots of different factors that relate to the competition there. And in response to that, more and more companies are really investing, uh, and improving their market intelligence capabilities so their ability to see what's going on. There's a lot of information that's available, um, we provide an enormous amount of it. But there's others, uh, as well that allow you to see who are the companies that, uh, um, are hiring, uh, for the kind of talent that you need. What is it going to take to get that talent, where do you go to get it, uh, and so forth. So there's more information sources, and leading companies are really leaning into tapping into that. So you're seeing investments in talent analytic groups, you're seeing investments into recruiting analytics teams. Um, you're seeing, uh, investments in tools that, uh, equip line managers and their HR staff, uh, to be aligned on what's happening in the market. There's an awful lot. Historically there's been a lot of conjecture and conventional wisdom and frankly anecdotal based arguments about what's happening in the competition for talent. Ops historically would face off against HR and compensation professionals, saying our policies are getting in the way of attracting talent. And they would list off one or two examples where that was the case. And if they had really strong voices, then those examples would carry the day. And now, uh, folks are being able to work off of a better, a better fact base, a better, more objective fact base to say this is what's actually happening. And then going beyond that and looking ahead and saying, actually we're seeing some trends that suggest we're out of position in certain markets and uh, you know, we need to make adjustments here. But again, it's, it's very local that those conversations are happening on. They're not, not just national. And uh, so, you know, that's one of the things that we're, we're seeing from, from the war on talent. There's a variety. So, so, you know, local is, is one aspect of a general theme, which is people are getting a lot more precise. They're just getting a lot more precise in how they look at talent and they're using data in ways that have never been used before, uh, to deal with that. There's a whole other trend that's going on from the job seeker standpoint, um, you know, the talent that's out there and how are they participating in the war on talent that is being driven by some of this transparency, but also in particular by AI that we can talk about also. Um, but from an employer standpoint, uh, I think most companies are now past the point of realizing that they can't think about the, you know, the, the pool of, of talent and their talent needs and how they compete for it in the ways that they did three or four years ago.

Speaker A: Okay, so you said it's a lot to do with local, the local environment. Is that because you're seeing a lot less hybrid work now?

Speaker B: No, no, we're still seeing a lot of hybrid work. Uh, there's a small, I would, I would characterize it as a small, uh, although they get a lot of press, a small segment of companies that are, you know, moving the pendulum back to in office work pretty, uh, significantly. But when you actually dig under the covers, um, unless you have a need to be in front of clients face to face, unless you have a need to, you know, for actual face to face work, uh, there still is A lot of hybrid work that's going on and still is a lot of 100% remote work that's going on. So I think that, you know, those horses have left the barn and it's going to be really tough. Just, I uh, just don't envision the whole trend around, around hybrid work in particular, you know, ever completely reversing.

Speaker A: Yeah. And that. So that doesn't affect what people pay then?

Speaker B: Well, it does actually. So I mean there's. When remote and hybrid work first significantly introduced a few years ago, um, the uh, I mean just, just to put it in perspective, prior to 2020 when we were tracking, uh, how many jobs were remote, that was less than 5% of advertised jobs. Okay. Just a few percent, small percent. And then right after the pandemic hit, that number jumped up to you know, over 40% and now it's back down to, you know, 20 to 25%. So it's still really high. It's still an order of magnitude bigger than it was five years, five years ago. But it opened up a whole can of worms around what do you pay? Right. So whereas before, if you were in really high cost areas, if you were out on the coast trying to compete for IT talent or talent that, that knew the IT marketplace, like you know, sales and marketing and, and recruiters that were really specialized around IT companies and you were in New York or you were in, you know, San Jose or San Francisco, or you were in Washington D.C. which there's a huge amount of IT talent there too. Um, most people don't realize, uh, you were paying, you were paying premiums, pretty significant premiums, location based premiums to attract that talent and then to say, well actually you can work anywhere in the country, including many, many, many places that have much lower, you know, cost of livings, cost of living, uh, that through the whole question about well, what's appropriate pay, you know, up in the air and folks have kind of sorted that out over the last, the last few years, the last two to three years, I think a lot of people have kind of sorted that out and it's so it's now it's much more of a blend that there's not kind of a national, you know, in many cases there's not really a, uh, you know, there's not hardened for remote work. There's not hard and fast geographic differentials, um, because that's just not appropriate anymore. And for work that is more localized, there are much more clearly defined geographic uh, differentials because you're competing much more locally for that talent.

Speaker A: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for that. M. So I know you said before that companies are winning the war for talent by using new sources of labor market intelligence. Is that what you're saying, that that kind of the intelligence there is the information that you are providing?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was the reason why I founded the business, uh, was because I just saw a real opportunity to make the labor market's huge, over $100 trillion in wages and benefits worldwide every single year. And the information about it has historically been really poor. How much should a job make? Well, you know, if you, even today, if you go online and you ask most sources, how much did a given job make, they won't give you an answer that's specific to, you know, the city that you're in. And the ranges are typically plus or minus at least 20%, uh, which is not very helpful. In fact, it's, it's, it's not helpful at all, um, to understand that and, and what drives that kind of, that kind of, you know, pay range? Well, it gets to things like experience and skills and what the competition looks like and whether there's, you know, how much of a supply for talent there is in a given location for that kind of job with those kinds of skills and so forth. And lots of different variables that, you know, if you were to look at a comparable market like the financial markets, all that information is, is factored in and, you know, on a microsecond by microsecond basis, you can figure out what an appropriate price for stock is. But in the job market, you know, you can't figure out within plus or minus 20%. That's just ridiculous.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Uh, it's not. Um, you know, it, it really gets in the way for both employers and job seekers, uh, to figure out how to chart their, you know, course and make. And make decisions about who to hire or which company to, you know, to work for. Um, so over the last several years, there's been a recognition that that situation is just not tenable. And the war for talent, uh, you know, has really become, uh, poignant in a higher inflation environment. When you're, when you're coasting on a 2 to 4% inflation environment like you've seen in, in the US and many developed worlds now, there's. Obviously, there's, there's countries where that's not the case, where inflation's much higher. But, but in environments like that where it's 2 to 4% a year, which it had been for many, many years, prior to, to 2021, um, you're not really worried about paying so close attention to pay because it's not going to go up very much in any, in any given year. So it's hard to make, you know, a wrong pay policy decision in that kind of environment. Now suddenly though, where pay is starting to fluctuate pretty significantly and local variances are, even if, if, if aggregate wage inflation is back down to the, you know, 4 to 5%, um, the local variances can be really significant, much higher than that. Uh, when you get down to an individual location level in that situation, you're much more concerned about making a, uh, uh, uh, you know, the right pay decisions because they either have big costs because you can't get or keep the talent you want or they have really big costs because you're overpaying for the talent. And that's a huge component of any company's P and L. And so, so yeah, companies are absolutely leaning into the, the information hasn't been available in the past and now it's starting to be available. And that's, you know, there's, we're not the only company that, that has identified a need for better market intelligence in the labor market. Um, and we're starting to see more and more companies availing themselves of that. We this, you know, this year, uh, for some of the larger companies that do a lot of recruiting or they have really big ah, payroll expenses, they've been investing in um, labor market data teams and now they've, they've even gotten to the point where they're investing in people that um, manage their spend on labor market data. Those jobs didn't exist. I mean maybe the individuals existed but, but the nature of the work, uh, kind of like purchasing for data, you know, purchasing, you know, role, uh, for data didn't exist a couple years ago and now we're seeing them, you know, in, in more and more cases. So companies are not just getting more savvy about how they use data, but also how they're, how they're curating data as an asset and they're managing their spend on it and the return on investment on it.

Speaker A: Brilliant. That's great. You know, before we end the show today, I wondered if there's anything you'd want to leave with the audience or any points that you want us to remember.

Speaker B: You know, I would, I would remind people that we're in a different world when it, when it comes for competing for talent and there's, you know, both, uh, that creates uh, requirements that are New but also amazing new opportunities. So your access to talent is actually much higher now than it has been in the past because your ability to reach globally, your ability to um, create flexible environments, uh, for folks to work will allow you to tap into talent that you haven't had before. From a career standpoint, uh, for job seekers, I would, you know, we, we haven't talked about AI on this, but I would say, um, AI makes it easier to get answers for job seekers. And most of those answers are very wrong. They are very inaccurate and outright wrong. And so you, the need to do your homework in an environment, you know, facilitated by AI is at least as big as it was, uh, as before AI really picked up, um, and that'll get mitigated over time. But AI is so easy to use right now that people take, you know, if you wanted to ask questions about where should I look for another job or how much should I get paid, you're going to get answers that are really well stated. Um, and those answers for anyone who will click down a level will realize most of those answers are not accurate. So you got to do your homework.

Speaker A: Yeah, because that's the thing, doesn't it? They sat. It sounds so sure of itself.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's stated with high authority. And you know, I'll argue with you

Speaker A: as well if you say that's not right. It's. Yes, it is. It's like

Speaker B: it's uh, and there's story after story of all of that. The other thing that that AI is doing is, especially with the genic AI is it's now empowering, you know, job seekers and employers to cover a lot more ground really, really super fast. Which means that there's just a ton of noise that's out there. There's a gazillion resumes that are flying around. There's a gazillion, you know, uh, agents that are trying to find candidates, uh, and that number just keeps growing and growing and growing. And so there's ah, a, you know, in talking with others that are other CEOs, other business leaders, our sense is that there is an undertone of a back to basics approach that is brewing because AI is just flooding the airwaves with noise. And so it's going to come back to basics, which is how good are you? How attractive are you to future employees? How well can you build relationships, uh, with the companies you want to work with and the employees that you want to have? Um, and that goes beyond just agents running around and blasting people with messages that they never read.

Speaker A: Yeah. I think it is amusing that the more you learn about AI, the more the experts think about AI, the more people say that the antidote is to go analog. So it's, ah, it's interesting.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, we use AI, uh, for efficiency purposes internally, so like back office efficiency, processing efficiency, things like that. But from a commercial standpoint, we don't use AI in fact, we do the opposite. We, you know, we build relationships, um, very individually.

Speaker A: M. Perfect. Carrie, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Speaker B: It's been a pleasure. Super happy to talk with you and thanks for your great questions.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you so much. And thank you out there for listening to the Maverick Paradox Podcast. I'm your host, Judith Germain. Hope, uh, you've enjoyed today's conversation. You can't lead what you don't influence. The Influence Blueprint reveals how your leadership is really landing and what's violently undermining your impact. Whether you're a leader ready to level up or an HR director tired of investing in development, that doesn't stick. This is where influence gets real. Find out more@maverickparadox.co.uk influence blueprint.