The Pointer Go-to-Market Index · Quarterly Edition

More GTM ads, fewer of the seats tech revenue teams hire for.

Q1 FY27 ANZ GTM Hiring Review (calendar Q3 2026). Thirteen weekly readings, weeks ending 5 July to 27 Sept 2026.

+7.2%

New GTM ads per week against last quarter (5,066 a week)

$100,000

Median advertised base, unchanged on 8,782 disclosed ads

25.9%

of GTM ads mention AI, level with last quarter (25.5%)

1 in 2

Ads from the 100 biggest hirers that copy another of their ads

Ricky Pearl · Pointer Strategy · 20+ years as a sales leader across ANZpointerstrategy.com

The Pointer Go-to-Market Index · Quarterly Edition

More GTM ads, fewer of the seats tech revenue teams hire for.

The Pointer Index: Q1 FY27 ANZ GTM Hiring Review, the first quarter of the Australian financial year (calendar Q3 2026). Thirteen weekly readings, weeks ending 5 July to 27 Sept 2026, and the 100 employers behind the most ads.

1. 1.Demand rose. ANZ employers opened 5,066 direct GTM ads a week in Q1 FY27, up 7.2% on Q4 FY26's 4,726, and every week sat between 4,317 and 5,506.
2. 2.Pay did not reprice. The median advertised base was $100,000 on 8,782 disclosed ads, the same as last quarter, with the middle half of the market between $82,500 and $125,000.
3. 3.The growth was not in tech sales seats. Account executive ads fell 12% a week, account manager ads 6% and customer success 9%, while marketing rose 15% and relationship-manager and banking titles 60%.
4. 4.Big hirers post the same job many times. The 100 biggest GTM hirers ran 10,529 ads for 5,464 unique ads, so about one in two was a copy. The four major banks were up 46% and the three big telcos down 38%.
5. 5.AI demand held steady and stayed out of front-line Sales. About one GTM ad in four mentions AI (25.9%, against 25.5% last quarter). In Sales it is 20.9%, against 21.4%.

The cleanest read on demand is the number of new ads employers open each week: an ad is counted in the week we first see it, and that week is fixed once we capture the ad. In Q1 FY27 direct employers opened 65,855 GTM ads, 5,066 a week against 4,726 a week in Q4 FY26, a rise of 7.2%. No week fell below 4,317 or rose above 5,506. Most of the lift came in July, the first weeks of the financial year, at 5,418 new ads a week. August and September eased to 4,873 a week, still above last quarter's 4,720 on the same weekly snapshots.

We checked whether the rise came from how we collect rather than from employers. LinkedIn, SEEK and careers sites contributed a similar share of new ads in both quarters, and our last recorded change to the LinkedIn and SEEK searches was in late April: measured against May and June alone (4,736 a week), the rise is the same. LinkedIn and SEEK grew; careers sites were flat.

The second chart is the count past editions called active roles. Until 4 October every ad was closed seven days after we last saw it, so this number tracked recent advertising, not the number of ads still live, and it fell from 7,029 in the week ending 12 July to 5,371 at the close while new ads were rising. We publish it as recorded and do not read it as demand. Closures and days on market are left out for the same reason; they return once we hold a full quarter of verified end dates.

This is the one place we test whether pay moved, because a quarter of disclosed ads is large enough to show it. It did not. The median advertised base was $100,000 across 8,782 ads that stated pay, against $100,000 on 7,061 last quarter. The 25th percentile moved from $81,999 to $82,500 and the 75th stayed at $125,000. More demand did not push up advertised bands.

Sales, Account Management and Customer Success sat on the same $100,000 median in both quarters, on samples large enough to trust. The bigger swings in the table, such as Presales, come from functions where only about a hundred ads a quarter state pay, and they read as sample noise rather than repricing. Disclosure itself stayed a minority habit: between 13.8% and 16.8% of GTM ads stated pay in any week.

The median is a headline, not a hiring plan. Below is the per-role breakdown, junior to senior, frozen at quarter close. Base is a published ANZ guide anchor adjusted by disclosed salaries in live ANZ ads at a capped weight, plus community submissions; each row states the listing count behind it. OTE is a curated guide estimate that takes no listing input, because the top of an advertised band is not on-target earnings.

Many "who's hiring" lists start with companies the author has heard of. These start from the ads: every direct-employer GTM ad in Australia and New Zealand over the 90 days to 22 Sept, counted twice, once as posted and once with the copies removed. The same ad goes up once per city on LinkedIn, again on SEEK, again on the careers site and again when it is refreshed. Across the market, 62,163 ads came down to 45,864 unique ads from 17,246 employers, so 26% were copies.

The copy rate climbs with size. At the 100 biggest hirers it is 48%: their 10,529 ads were 5,464 unique ads. Stryker posted 384 ads for 73 unique ones. Amazon, including AWS, posted 653 for 334. Salesforce posted 264 for 82. Size a competitor from a job feed and you can be out by a factor of five. Even so, the 100 biggest hirers hold only 11.9% of unique ads. The rest of the market is spread across seventeen thousand employers.

The lists rank on unique ads: distinct requisition links where we have the employer's careers site, otherwise distinct posting weeks per title. A unique ad is still not a headcount. It might be filling one seat or six, and the ad does not say. Recruiters are excluded and the top of each list was checked by hand.

The 100 biggest tech GTM hirers

Tech here means software, internet platforms, cloud and infrastructure, cybersecurity, IT services and resellers, payments infrastructure and the telcos. Employers our company data flags as tech posted 10,346 unique GTM ads this quarter, from 2,650 companies; that flag is rougher than the definition above, so read it as the size of the sector, not of this table. The 100 below, checked by hand, posted 3,200 unique ads from 6,232. Amazon (including AWS), Check Point, Palo Alto Networks and the distributors Dicker Data and Tech Data were up on last quarter; Salesforce, Databricks, Snowflake and SAP were down.

The 100 biggest GTM hirers, all industries

Take the industry filter off and the list changes character. The four major banks (ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB) posted 463 unique ads against 317 last quarter, up 46%, mostly relationship and small-business banking roles. The three big telcos (Telstra, Optus, Vocus) went the other way, 131 against 210, down 38%.

vs prior qtr compares unique ads with the 80 days from 6 April, scaled to 90 days. First published in The Pointer Index, Issue 24.

The quarter added about 340 GTM ads a week. Read by job title, which never changes after we capture an ad, very little of that landed in the seats a software revenue team hires for. Account executive ads fell from 223 a week to 197, account manager and key account ads from 496 to 468, and customer success from 106 to 96. Together that is 64 fewer ads a week in the three seats. SDR and BDR ads (105 a week) and presales (138) were flat.

The growth went to marketing, up from 864 to 992 ads a week, to relationship-manager and banking titles, up from 57 to 90 (about 30% of them at banks), and to business development managers, up from 399 to 425. GTM demand grew this quarter. The account executive seat, the core of software new-business selling, did not.

Leadership titles (head of, director, VP, chief, general manager) were 6.0% of new ads against 5.5% last quarter, a small move. Our function totals, below, are set by a classifier that we keep refining. Where they disagree with the titles, as with Growth and RevOps, the titles are the better guide.

25.9% of the 41,210 LinkedIn and careers-site GTM ads first seen this quarter mention AI, against 25.5% last quarter on the same detector. That is no real change. By function the picture is the same: Presales 51.4% to 53.8%, Customer Success 44.8% to 45.4%, Marketing 25.7% to 26.1%.

Front-line Sales did not move either, 21.4% to 20.9%. Last quarter we said the tell to watch was whether AI spread from the technical layer into Sales. It has not. AI language sits in the ads for the roles around the seller, not the seller's own.

Sydney carried 1,630 new GTM ads a week to Melbourne's 971. It advertised a median base of $105,000 against $98,675 in Melbourne and $97,977 in Perth, and 35.5% of its LinkedIn and careers-site ads mention AI, against 29.6% in Melbourne and 15.9% in Perth. Brisbane and Perth are sales towns: Sales is 49.6% and 53.4% of their GTM ads, against 37.0% in Sydney.

The Q4 FY26 edition set four things to watch. Here is how each landed.

The Pointer Index tracks GTM job ads across Australia and New Zealand, collected daily from LinkedIn, SEEK and company careers sites. Each ad is classified by function, role and seniority by a large language model and only genuine go-to-market roles are kept. Recruitment agency ads are excluded throughout. GTM means Sales, Account Management, Marketing, Customer Success, Presales, RevOps, Enablement, Partnerships, Growth, Product Marketing and GTM Engineering.

Quarter figures in this edition count ads by the week we first saw them, which is fixed when we capture the ad. Counts can still shift slightly as ads are reclassified or flagged as agency ads later. Q1 FY27 is the thirteen weeks from 29 June to 27 September 2026; it is compared with the twelve weeks from 6 April to 28 June as a weekly rate, leaving out the first tracked week, which contains the backfill of everything already live. Weekly series are the insert-only snapshots taken each Sunday, published as recorded.

Pay figures are medians of the midpoint of disclosed advertised bands. What an ad states may be base, OTE-inclusive or package-inclusive. AI figures come from a detector that scans the full ad text for AI language; it measures the ad, not the role. AI rates use LinkedIn and careers-site ads only, because SEEK ad text was cut short until mid-August and its rate moved with text length, not the market. If a number is wrong we correct it openly in the next edition and never restate a past one silently.

Caveats for this edition

• ·The weekly 'advertised' count is the number of GTM ads seen in the previous seven days. Until 4 October 2026 every ad was closed seven days after we last saw it, so this count tracks recent advertising, not the number of ads still live. It is published as recorded and not restated.
• ·Closures, openings against closures and days on market are not reported for this quarter. They return once a full quarter of verified end dates exists.
• ·Weekly openings are new direct-employer GTM ads first seen that week, including reposts. The quarter-on-quarter comparison is a weekly rate: Q3 has 13 weeks, Q2 has 12 (the backfill week ending 5 April is excluded).
• ·Function totals come from a classifier that is refined over time, so every function claim in this report is cross-checked against job titles, which never change after we capture them.
• ·AI mention rates are measured on LinkedIn and careers-site ads only, with the same detector in both quarters. SEEK ad text was truncated until mid-August, so SEEK's rate moved with text length rather than the market. They measure the language of the ad, not the substance of the role.
• ·Quarter counts are fixed to the week we first saw each ad, but can still shift slightly as ads are reclassified or flagged as agency ads after they arrive.
• ·Pay figures are medians of the midpoint of disclosed advertised bands, AUD only (NZD for New Zealand cities). Cells under 30 disclosed ads are suppressed and 30 to 99 are treated as directional.
• ·Employer lists cover the 90 days to 22 September and rank on unique ads (distinct careers-site requisition links where we have them, otherwise distinct posting weeks per title). A unique ad is not a headcount. Recruiters are excluded and the top of each list was checked by hand.
• ·Agency share is not trended: the agency flag improves over time, so the stored weekly series mixes detection vintages.
• ·From the week ending 4 October (W40) LinkedIn and careers-site ads close when Fantastic Jobs reports them gone, SEEK ads at SEEK's own end date, and untracked ads 30 days after we last see them. LinkedIn is collected through Fantastic Jobs from 25 September. Live counts from Q2 FY27 are not comparable with this report's seven-day counts.

All figures may be cited with attribution to The Pointer Index, Q1 FY27 (calendar Q3 2026), Pointer Strategy. Charts and tables may be reproduced with a link back to this page. For the underlying data, a methodology question or a custom cut, contact Ricky Pearl at Pointer Strategy.