Flash poll: will tariffs impact comp?
Monitor how comp teams are responding to market volatility. Poll results are aggregate and anonymized, and available to participants only.
I’ve already been asked a dozen times since yesterday whether any comp teams are reacting to the tariff-induced stock market volatility.
This could be a defining moment for the talent market in 2025 and beyond, much like COVID in 2020 or interest rate hikes in 2022… or it could blow over.
To help you monitor market change, I asked my team to put together a flash poll. Participate by clicking the button below:
We’ll keep the poll open through Friday and return results early next week. Results are available to poll participants only.
Flash poll questions cover:
Equity targets
Retention grants
Benchmarking
Employee communication
Hiring plans
It should take about five minutes to complete.
What are the comp risks?
It’s too early to closely analyze this yet, and the poll results will be revealing whether teams are making moves.
With that said, a couple initial thoughts:
If the stock market stays in correction territory, then the seasonal timing is acutely bad for employees at the many companies that made refresh grants in March (I actually wrote about this timing risk a few months ago)
If we see pull backs on IPOs and M&A, this could create a liquidity crisis in tech, including employee access to secondary/public sales, acutely for late-stage privates, as well covered here, here, and here
We could see big private tech companies gain a short-term edge over their public rivals in attracting AI talent. Well-funded and recently funded companies like OpenAI, Databricks, and Stripe can tell a longer-term, less market-sensitive value story, while their public counterparts face declining unvested equity values
Companies with flexible comp programs may see employees flee to cash safety in their next election, driving up cash spend and reducing share burn, and some frank conversations with finance
More generally, sliding towards recession could bring back difficult and all-too-recent memories from 2022/2023 — hiring freezes, layoffs, pay range reductions, and more. It’s way too early and fast-changing to know, let’s hope not
Peer Group is a newsletter for comp leaders navigating competitive talent markets! If you want to share my newsletter, you can forward this email to your colleagues and fellow comp leaders.
Want more polls and insights about the latest thinking in comp?
Subscribe by hitting the button below.