The professional world has changed forever.

While markets hit new highs, a more profound transformation is reordering the nature of work. We all know it; the employee-employer dynamic will never be the same. Predictable, linear careers have died. 

We are entering the age of the employee as a company—a self-contained business entity composed of skills, experiences and provable capabilities. They don’t climb a ‘ladder’, they roll like a snowball!

For employers this could be the most significant opportunity to build a competitively agile and future-proof organisation. 

The ‘ladder’ was a traditional career path designed within a predictable system.

Do you feel like we’re moving towards anything predictable, ever again?

The ‘ladder’ has always given young, high ambition candidates the ick. “How boring” they’ve eternally quipped. Now, “How risky!”

In 2024-25 we saw some of the brightest minds, and the most performant teams at the most profitable companies on the planet get the chop. Do you really think the ‘corporate ozempic’ trend of downsizing is going to end in 2026?

The new trajectory for candidates isn’t a ladder anymore; it’s a snowball. The “employee as a company” views their career not as a straight-line progression but as a business to be grown. The primary objective is to build a diverse and powerful toolkit of skills and experiences that serves their own long-term value first. 

 

The Devaluation of Credentials 

“…Expertise doesn’t compound anymore. It depreciates. And the rate of depreciation is accelerating” – Scott Clary.

The currency of talent is changing. The value of traditional credentials, like a prestigious job title or a degree from an elite uni is fading rapidly. Great candidates on-paper are not actually getting interviewed, and/or are failing interviews quickly when there is no recent proof of building.

  • What can you show me you have personally built? 
  • What problems did it solve? 
  • How have you applied tools to create a tangible outcome? 

The best candidates show this via their own websites with much more context than a CV can, allowing links to things they’ve built, working projects, screenshots etc. It’s a more entrepreneurial approach that aims to give a candidate more control.

The value of the CV is in a free-fall. Since AI writes, tailors and auto-applies a candidates CV to hundreds of specific roles that they are auto-applying to, companies and recruiters are stopping posting Job Ads. Personal websites get around this vicious cycle. 

Tiago Forte (founder of Forte Labs and renowned productivity expert) tells a story where he was recently hiring for an important role and received a huge amount of applications.
He separated them into two piles: one for candidates with a website, and one for those without. The stack without websites was simply binned.

Take an exceptional candidate we’re working with, Katherine Maree Pace. She has led teams to invent successful products, negotiated deals with Olympians, raised venture capital and fought Apple on the App Store—and won. Her CV lists some of these achievements, her website tells the story – Check it out here, which she built with Framer in 5 hours.

This is an exceptional example, though it applies to any role function. Competitive candidates need to be in a constant state of creation and experimentation, building their own library of projects, tools, agents, automations – things that can enhance their output, thus worth.  

Dismayed candidates are those still defending their title or past experience, versus learning and building something relevant to now.  

 

For employers 

You’re no longer hiring a specialist to fill a static role. You are hiring an Employagencee (🙃), an individual in-house agency. 

It requires a complete overhaul of your org. design, job design and essentially how you view talent. It means fostering an environment where these “in-house individual-agencies” can do their best work.

So, are you building a collection of employees or an ecosystem of owners?