Issue 17 of The Pointer Index · Week ending 9 August 2026
Some weeks the market tells you something. This one does not, and that is worth ten seconds of your attention rather than ten minutes.
The numbers
What to do about it
Nothing.
The pool moved less than it usually does. So did the mix. No function fell far enough to read as a retreat and none climbed far enough to read as a build. If you were planning to open two AE roles this month, open them. If you were holding, hold. Nothing here changes the call either way.
That is a finding, not a filler week. Most weekly market copy manufactures a story because it has a slot to fill, and a reader who acts on manufactured stories ends up rebuilding a plan every seven days for no reason. The ANZ GTM market is big enough that a quiet week is the base case. Knowing which weeks to ignore is most of the value of watching it weekly at all.
Whether pay itself has moved is a quarterly question. The weekly sample cannot answer it and we do not ask it here.
One number to watch
5,882. If the next two weeks land near it, the pool has found a level. A move beyond about 6% is the first thing worth reading.
Ricky Pearl, Pointer Strategy
pointerstrategy.com/market-data
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*Methodology.* "GTM" means Sales, Account Management, Marketing, CS, Presales, RevOps, Enablement, Partnerships, Growth, PMM, and GTM Engineering. Numbers come from live ANZ job listings scraped from public records. Recruitment agency listings are excluded throughout. Market-index figures are point-in-time snapshots at the close of the reporting week, recorded in an insert-only weekly index that is never recomputed. We publish the size of the active pool rather than a weekly net, because a listing that closes and later reposts has its closing date cleared, so opening and closing counts overstate turnover and do not sum to the change in the pool. The live dashboard updates continuously and may differ slightly.
*On calling this week quiet.* The comparison is against every week since 8 June 2026: absolute week-on-week moves in the active pool run 0.3%, 0.9%, 3.6%, 5.1%, 6.8%, 11.3%, 11.4% and 21.2%, a median of 6.0%. This week's 5.1% sits below that median. Nine weekly readings is a short base for a volatility claim and we will say so until it is longer.
*On the seniority readings.* Entry-level share and leadership load changed definition on 8 June 2026 and are not comparable with anything before that date. Measured across every week since, entry-level averages 15.7% and leadership load 8.9%; this week's 15.1% and 9.6% are both within half a standard deviation of those averages, which is what "inside the normal range" means here. Both are shares of the active pool, not of new listings.
*On the salary figures.* Medians of advertised AUD bands from 841 listings that disclosed pay, against 1,025 the week before. Disclosure ran at 15.0% this week. These are levels, not a movement claim: a weekly sample this size cannot detect a real change in pay, which is why repricing is only assessed in the quarterly index.
*On the pool comparison.* Both readings are Sunday snapshots taken before that day's LinkedIn collection, the same point in the cycle as the four weeks before them, so the endpoints are like for like.
*Corrections.* If a number looks wrong, reply to the newsletter or contact us. Corrections run in the next issue.
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