Do pay practices and skills management influence lateral mobility?
By Laura Albini, Global Senior Compensation Analyst, AVEVA
How to protect your organisation’s Social Media accounts from hackers
Business social media accounts often grow in bits and pieces. One employee creates the Facebook Page. Someone else connects Instagram, and an outside agency is later given access to run advertising.
Urgent - IT security alert for those with websites
As you may well have heard in news headlines – two worldwide critical security vulnerabilities were discovered and released yesterday, 21 October, 2026.
These vulnerabilities lie within a programming language called PHP, which is a language used widely for websites.
Why protecting the value of a collaboration takes more than a contract
At a recent Cambridge Network event featuring Cambridge Enterprise, I was reminded how deeply human the commercialisation process is. Alongside the technical, legal and financial arrangements, how people work together determines whether an agreement delivers its promise.
Workplace Needs Assessments: Beyond the fix
TL;DR: Ask most people what a workplace needs assessment is for, and they will describe a response to a problem: a complaint, a performance concern, something that has already gone wrong. That is true, but it is only half the job.
Startup candidates want to understand their impact, not just their package
A strong startup offer does not start at the offer stage. It starts with a clear interview process.
Equity still matters in startups.
Booking an airport car for a colleague or visitor: a checklist for Cambridge businesses
This guide is for PAs, EAs, office managers and others arranging airport transport for colleagues, clients or visitors in Cambridge. When the person making the booking is not the person travelling, a few additional details need to be handled clearly.
Explore the Image Ability blog
Explore the Image Ability blog for articles and reflections on image literacy, executive presence, leadership, cultural intelligence and the relationship between how we communicate, behave and present ourselves.
Automating hiring before fixing interviews is the wrong order
The risk is not that AI replaces human judgement. The risk is that teams automate around weak judgement instead of improving it.
HR teams are under pressure to do more with less.
Candidates need clearer interviews too
A strong interview answer is not just a story. It is evidence of judgement, action and impact.
Candidates are facing a harder hiring market.
Your visitor has landed. Now what? Planning international arrivals to Cambridge
Somewhere over the Atlantic right now, a visiting researcher is trying to work out how to get from Heathrow to Cambridge. They have a hotel name, a meeting at nine tomorrow morning, and a phone that may not connect as expected when they land.
AI will not fix hiring teams that still run weak interviews
AI can make hiring faster. It cannot make a weak interview process fair, structured or evidence-led by default.
AI is already changing how internal recruitment teams work.
How to interview when the role will change before the person starts
In a startup, you are not only hiring for the role in front of you. You are hiring for the role it may become.
Startup roles rarely stay still.
Stop hiring heroes but build a repeatable interview system instead.
A scaling company cannot rely on heroic judgement. It needs repeatable evidence.
Every founder wants people who can raise the level of the company.
The Invisible Curriculum: How Are Your Managers Really Learning to Manage?
Most organisations would never put someone into a specialist technical role and simply hope they worked out how to do it.
Yet we do something remarkably similar with management.
Remote-first hiring only works when the interview process is structured
Remote-first hiring only works when hiring managers know what to assess, what to ask and what evidence to capture.
Remote-first startups have a clear advantage.
Your values page is not your culture
A startup’s culture is not what it says on the values page. It is what happens when pressure, trade-offs and hiring decisions arrive.
Most startup values sound the same.
Generalists help startups start but specialists help them scale.
Generalists are often the reason a startup gets moving. They are not always the people who can carry every function through scale.
Early startups need generalists.
When leaving feels easier than moving, internal mobility is broken.
If it is easier for someone to get hired by a competitor than move inside their own company, internal mobility is not working.
Large organisations often say they want to retain talent, build career paths and promote from within.
Internal mobility fails when internal interviews feel less fair than external ones.
Internal mobility is not just a retention strategy. It is a trust test.
Growing companies often talk about developing people from within.
Culture does not scale through vibes but through processes.
Process does not kill culture. Weak process lets culture become whatever the loudest person in the room says it is.
Early-stage companies often treat informality as part of their identity.
Fast hiring fails when speed outruns evidence you can trust.
Hiring fast is not the problem. Hiring fast with weak evidence is.
Startups are often told to move quickly, hire quickly and scale before the market moves on.
Scale-ups do not need a harsher talent bar. They need a clearer one.
A high talent bar is not about being harder on candidates. It is about being clearer on what the company actually needs.
Every scale-up says it wants to hire brilliant people.
Scale-ups hire middle managers too late because the signals are unclear
Flat teams feel fast until every decision starts waiting for the same few people.
Startups often begin with a strong dislike of hierarchy.
Technical interviews lose talent when they test the wrong thing
A technical interview should show how someone thinks, builds and works with others. Too many still test how well they perform under artificial pressure.
Technical hiring is one of the hardest parts of scaling a startup.