Robert Ardell
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 W2, 1099, and C2C are three ways to paper the same contractor, where W2 makes the person an employee of you or your staffing firm, 1099 pays an individual directly, and C2C contracts with the business entity that person owns. Same human being, same laptop, same standup … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Boomerang employees are workers who leave a company and later return, and by March 2025 they made up 35 percent of all new hires in ADP’s payroll data, the highest share since 2018. Most articles on the subject treat that as a feel-good story about loyalty. It … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 A head of analytics is the person who decides what your company’s numbers mean, then defends those definitions to finance, product, and the board. Pay in 2026 runs from roughly $168,000 to $294,000 depending on which tracker you ask. Whether the hire works has almost nothing to … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Zendesk is not running a company-wide engineering layoff in 2026. Global headcount grew roughly 10 percent last year to about 6,821 people, and engineering is still the largest function at around 45 percent of the company. The cuts that did land were regional and support-side, led by … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 A ServiceNow administrator governs a live platform rather than closing tickets on one, and most U.S. hires in 2026 land between $95,000 and $150,000 depending on how much of the instance they own. The band is not the hard part. The hard part is that three salary … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 A growth product manager owns one funnel metric and moves it through controlled experiments, and in 2026 most U.S. hires land between $130,000 and $240,000 base depending on level. The number that decides whether the hire works is not the salary. It is how many users walk … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 A product operations manager builds the systems, data, and cadences a product team runs on, and in 2026 most U.S. hires land between $120,000 and $185,000 in base salary. That range covers four genuinely different jobs, which is the whole difficulty. One of them keeps Jira honest. … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 A U.S. tech recruiter earns a median base near $90,000 in 2026, with most in-house offers landing between $70,000 and $130,000, while agency recruiters run lower bases plus commission and big-tech recruiters clear $200,000 total. That spread is not sloppy data. It is three completely different pay … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 A director of data engineering runs your data platform through other managers, and in 2026 that seat costs $215,000 to $310,000 in base salary depending on how many teams sit under it. The band is wide because the job is. Some of these directors own one warehouse … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Hiring a director of product management in 2026 means budgeting $200,000 to $285,000 base, $300,000 to $600,000 total at tech-competitive employers, and deciding first whether you are buying an outcome owner or an org builder. Those are two different people. The pay lands in the same place. … Read more
