Data-driven market trends and advice

Our new white paper. Clients increasingly want partners who can deliver rapid, measurable change rather than advice, and the senior talent best placed to deliver it now often sits outside the big consulting firms. Drawing on data from more than 100,000 strategy and transformation professionals, we look at what this shift means for buyers of consulting and the delivery models replacing the traditional firm.

The Strategy and Transformation Hiring Index closed Q2 2026 at 39 - its highest reading since October 2023. This has been driven primarily by freelance hiring demand in Private Equity, but momentum in corporate and advisory is also growing.

We’ve seen a structural shift in the composition of demand over those 2.5 years, with companies preferring to bring in expertise on an interim basis. A second shift is visible in the mandates themselves - a quarter of the roles that went live with us in Q2 2026 mention AI in the job description, against roughly one in six a year ago.

Fifty people, one former CEO of Xero, Apple Asia Pacific, Ninemsn and Microsoft ANZ. The Movemeon Group brought together a small group of clients, network members and friends of the firm in Sydney for a fireside chat between Steve Vamos and Movemeon co-founder Richard Rosser, introduced and closed by Pete Clifton-Smith (GM APAC, The Movemeon Group), with closing remarks from Richard Whiteoak (MD, Whiteoak Private Equity).

The brief was simple: what does it actually take to lead, and to lead well, through constant disruption? What followed was one of the clearest, most practical breakdowns of the CEO role that anyone in the room had heard.

Meta UK's chief exec (ex-McKinsey, ex-Sequoia) shares a career framework built on rising complexity and expanding influence rather than titles, plus advice to stay close enough to real work to catch mistakes, including bad AI outputs. She ties this to Meta's strategy: WhatsApp agents aim to restore personal trust at scale, AI is expanding jobs rather than cutting them, and targeted fixes beat blanket bans.

The Chief of Staff role has become a key early hire in PE-backed portfolio companies, helping CEOs create leverage in the critical post-acquisition phase. It plays a central role in driving Value Creation Plan execution, strengthening investor communications, and improving leadership team effectiveness. This article explores why demand for the role has increased and what good looks like in practice.

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A structural shift in talent is enabling organisations to access senior operators and specialists on a flexible, project basis at scale. First-mover PE and enterprise clients are moving away from traditional consulting toward agile, workstream-based teams combining ex-MBB partners, operators, and experts to deliver lower cost and often higher-quality execution, while also embedding lightweight internal capability to retain momentum after delivery.

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The Hiring Index has reached a two-year high, driven by a sharp increase in private equity demand for strategy and transformation talent. As hiring models shift and supply remains strong, the market is becoming more competitive and increasingly reliant on flexible, specialist expertise.

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