Welcome to The Digital Dinosaur

I started recruiting in tech and digital marketing in 1998. To put that in context, the iPhone did not exist, “social media” meant a fax with a smiley face on it, and the cutting edge of web design was a website that loaded before you lost interest. I have been placing people into technology and digital roles ever since, which in internet years makes me roughly 312 years old. A digital dinosaur, if you like.

So consider this the first entry in the field notes of one.

This is a weekly newsletter about the Australian tech, AI and digital marketing hiring market. It is free. It will stay free for the foreseeable future. And it is written for the people who actually live in this market: founders, CEOs, CTOs, CMOs, product and digital leaders, hiring managers, and the senior candidates they are all quietly fighting over.

Because the market has gone a bit mad again, and I have seen this particular flavour of madness before.

Every few years a new technology arrives, everyone loses their minds, job titles mutate overnight, salaries do something silly, and a wave of brand new experts appears who were doing something completely different eighteen months ago. I have survived dial-up, Flash developers, SEO cowboys, growth ninjas, crypto recruiters and now the AI gold rush. The robots are shinier now, but the hiring mistakes are still very human.

Right now in Australia, every second company wants to “do something with AI” and is not entirely sure what. Half the candidates have added “AI” to their LinkedIn headline. Budgets are tight in some places and oddly loose in others. Hybrid arrangements are being quietly renegotiated. And good people are still slipping through hiring processes that move at the speed of a committee.

That is exactly the kind of moment where clear-eyed market intelligence is worth something. Not predictions. Not hot takes. Just what is actually happening, from someone whose job is to watch it every single day.

Let me be blunt about AI, since it is the thing everyone wants me to be excited about.

AI is genuinely changing what teams need. That part is real. But the hiring market around it is full of noise. There is a difference between someone who has shipped machine learning systems into production and someone who has watched a lot of YouTube and can say “LLM” with confidence. Telling those two people apart is now one of the most valuable skills a hiring manager can have, and most do not have it yet.

Or, as they say in The Castle: tell ‘em they’re dreamin’.

Over the coming weeks I will dig into how to identify real AI talent, what these people actually cost in the Australian market, and why so many “AI roles” are really just the old roles wearing a new hat. If you are hiring in this space, or trying to get hired in it, I want this newsletter to be the thing that saves you from an expensive mistake.

A short, sharp read every week. Usually a market observation, what it means if you are hiring, what it means if you are a candidate, and a practical takeaway or two. Australian context throughout, because hiring in Sydney is not the same as hiring in San Francisco, no matter what the latest US thought-leader thread suggests.

Topics will move with the market, but expect a steady diet of: AI hiring, digital marketing talent, salary reality, the onsite versus hybrid standoff, startup hiring mistakes, why job ads fail, and what founders keep misunderstanding about recruitment.

What this is not is a brochure for my company. I run Big Wave Digital, an Australian recruitment agency specialising in tech, AI, digital, data, product and digital marketing. That work is what gives me the view. But this newsletter is the thinking, not the sales pitch. If it is ever useful enough that you want to talk hiring, you know where to find me. If not, you still get a good read every week for free.

This newsletter is for people who want signal, not another bucket of LinkedIn soup. If that sounds like you, subscribe below. It costs nothing and it lands once a week.

Then do two things. Forward it to one person you know who is hiring badly right now, because we both know who that is. And hit reply to tell me what you want me to cover. I read every response, and the best editions of this thing will come from questions real people are actually stuck on.

The tools will keep getting shinier. The buzzwords will keep coming. I will keep translating it all back into plain English, with the occasional bad joke.

Welcome to The Digital Dinosaur. Let’s get into it.

Keiran

Founder, Big Wave Digital. AI, tech and digital marketing recruitment in Sydney and across Australia.

Website: bigwavedigital.com.au | Big Wave Digital on LinkedIn