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Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. | |
BENEFITS & COMPENSATION
Our best and final offer
Salary negotiation: Is it dead and gone?
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FOR DECADES, THE process of landing a job has generally involved a delicate ritual to seal the deal: the salary negotiation. Price discovery in the white-collar job market has long worked based on this mechanism, with wages moving moderately over time as they were agreed upon in the negotiation phase.
But like everything else in the job market, the old rules are beginning to break down in 2025, and analysts are starting to see the salary negotiation dying off and the “best and final offer” phenomenon rising in its place.
“According to both candidates and HR pros, more and more companies are presenting jobs with best and final pay offers right away,” reads a new report from organizational consulting firm Korn Ferry. The practice is growing out of the tech sector and starting to appear as a more common feature in professional hiring.
“The goal is to end a negotiation before it starts, at a time when the job market leaves candidates with few options,” Korn Ferry’s report stated.
One reason this is happening is the positioning of employers, who appear significantly more anxious to close the deal quickly, and who are leveraging the perceived strength of their position in the labour market.
But there’s another factor to consider — pay transparency laws. Some research on pay transparency laws suggest they may have the effect of suppressing wage growth, partly because they push employers towards more standardized pay structures, and partly because as published ranges narrow, the potential movement in any negotiation shrinks. Whether or not it is always true, companies can now point to these laws and say they are being compliant, insisting that the package in front of a candidate is just standard procedure.
It’s questionable whether this is a sustainable long-term strategy, though. Employers may be taking advantage of a weak labour market now, but the days of businesses complaining about worker shortages and a lack of employee loyalty weren’t all that long ago, and it would probably be a mistake to think those days are never going to return.
Korn Ferry’s report argues that businesses are taking a risk hiring talent in this fashion.
“To say [there is no room for negotiation] at the outset takes away from the perceived value of the individual,” said Korn Ferry’s Dennis Deans. Or as Kim Waller, Korn Ferry senior client partner, put it: “If I hear ‘My way or the highway,’ I might be looking at something else.”
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SOCIAL MEDIA
Women are having sex changes — on LinkedIn
Bro boost: Women say their LinkedIn traffic increases if they pretend to be men
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SOMETIMES, IT FEELS like it’s wall-to-wall bros on LinkedIn pages. Yes, they’re an outsized part of the user base (it’s 57 per cent men), but that can’t always account for it. What might is the accusation that LinkedIn’s algorithm is literally uplifting the boys — and boosting their posts.
From the outset, we should say that LinkedIn has officially denied any of this. But there’s some compelling anecdotal evidence out there.
“I changed my gender to male on LinkedIn a week ago, and my views went up 400 per cent. I wish I were making that up,” wrote social worker Megan Cornish. (The other thing Cornish did was to have ChatGPT rewrite her posts to be more stereotypically male-coded, even redoing some past low-performing posts to test the theory.)
Others repeated the test. LinkedIn user Lucy Ferguson decided to go as Luke Ferguson for a day and saw her post impressions skyrocket by 818 per cent, she said. Another changed only the back-end gender setting and said she got a 700 per cent boost.
It’s a lot of anecdotal- type evidence, but still. The story got enough traction that LinkedIn did have to respond, issuing a statement saying their algorithms “do not use gender as a ranking signal, and changing gender on your profile does not affect how your content appears in search or feed.”
Whether that will be enough to convince people who are already pretty certain that LinkedIn is a space that amplifies certain male traits, we’re not sure.
“It’s impossible to make a judgment based on this experiment, no matter how compelling the 400 per cent result is,” wrote Inc.com columnist Suzanne Lucas. “You can’t control the algorithm, but you can control clarity, confidence and consistency. Write like someone who knows their voice has value. That’s probably your best bet.”
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Terry Talk: Balancing instinct and analytics
| Are you calibrating emotion and data? In this Terry Talk, Ahria Consulting president & CEO Terry Gillis explores why most choices are emotionally driven — and how to balance gut instinct with reliable data. Learn how to calibrate emotion, test impressions and use assessments to measure culture fit, risk tolerance and skills. Make better decisions by linking emotion to data for clear, actionable narratives. | | | |
COMMUNICATIONS
The times they are New Roman
The rise of serif fonts: How retro typography is taking over modern design
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YOU, THE CONSUMER, have been liberated, and you don’t even know it yet. For many years, we have all toiled under the tyranny of sans-serif fonts, maybe even longing for the days when the elegant wings of, say, Garamond, graced the front of a billboard.
Have you felt a little lighter in your steps these days, then, with serif fonts beginning to reappear in public ad copy and branding? Does your morning coffee taste a bit better? Does it feel like there are more hours in the day?
“Look around and you’ll start noticing the likes of Baskerville Regular and Editorial New everywhere, from ads for New Balance sneakers to David protein-bar packaging to White House websites,” reads a column in The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a condensed serif in particular that’s now sweeping the nation. The last time this style of typography took off, Ronald Reagan was in office and the country was undergoing a financial and technological upheaval.”
Some argue we’re seeing it because it feels nostalgic in the age of AI and rapid change. “I myself am unequivocally guilty of the serif-as-humanity signaling,” wrote Keya Vadgma. But then, boot up Claude.ai, and there it is, a serif-fonted greeting. It’s also in a Perplexity ad.
It feels very human, goes this line of thinking, and that’s valuable at a time when people are anxious about that sort of thing. “It’s not that difficult to discern why AI-native companies in particular are being drawn to serif fonts. Serifs add visual interest and warmth. It signals, ‘We’re AI, but real human use and made our product, we swear!’” Vadgma wrote.
“Consumers today yearn for a more emotional, purposeful and richer experience,” added designer Yash Khare. “Our subconscious is ingrained with serif fonts. They have long represented holiness, focus and purpose.”
But all it really proves is one thing: design swings like a pendulum. Don’t whimper too much as you shuffle Montserrat and Arial to the back of the pack. This moment, too, shall pass. “What feels fresh today can look tired tomorrow, only to come back around with sharper edges and a new perspective,” wrote designer Petra Campbell (in sans-serif, you might add!). “The pendulum is swinging, and design is richer for it. Serif is back — not as a relic, but as a redefined tool for digital, web and print storytelling.”
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TECHNOLOGY
A profit fantasy?
Who is using AI in Canada? Just about everybody. Who is seeing a return? Just about nobody
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SOME FORM OF AI adoption among Canadian businesses is near universal, with 93 per cent of businesses surveyed by KPMG recently stating they are using it. But, like we’ve seen elsewhere, AI technology isn’t yet showing any dividends.
“Despite growing adoption, only two per cent of respondents said their organizations are seeing a return on their generative AI investments,” a report from KPMG said. KPMG managing partner Stephanie Terrill said while organizations are using AI to try to improve productivity, “very few know how to capture productivity gains and turn them into growth.”
There’s been much concern about a bubble in AI recently, including on the stock market, and this is another report that won’t help advocates of the tech. It’s a concern Terrill brushes off. “That two per cent was disappointing and surprising. I would have hoped and expected it to be higher,” she told The Globe and Mail. “Deploying AI needs to go beyond using AI to draft e-mails. We need to get out of the tinkering and get into the re-engineering and re-architecting of how workloads are processed.”
Yet, despite the lowly returns, the study also found that Canadian businesses sure are enthusiastic about AI, which is expected to consume 10 to 20 per cent of corporate budgets this year for most firms surveyed by KPMG. Whether or not it’s turning a profit, AI is coming regardless, and businesses appear more than willing to play the long game.
“Only a small sliver of Canadian businesses are generating growth from their AI investments today, and that’s understandable — new technologies take time to be adopted and demonstrate identifiable return on investment,” Terrill said.
But the questions remain about just how patient firms will be. “How long do companies have to wait until AI starts doing what it’s supposed to do?” wrote Gizmodo reporter Lucas Ropek, skeptically. “Hope springs eternal, I guess.”
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