Matt McFarlane didn't want to listen to people's problems all day.
That was the main reason he ruled out becoming a psychologist, even after completing a psychology degree he'd started, mostly because he enjoyed the subject in high school and didn't have a better idea.
"I like to joke that I didn't want to listen to people's problems all day," he says, "but then I ended up pursuing a profession where I kind of did that anyway."
A friend of a friend who worked in business, mentioned that a lot of psychologists end up in HR. McFarlane looked into it, liked what he heard about organisational psychology, and decided that was the direction. There was no grand plan. No calling. Just a psychology graduate in Brisbane who couldn't land an entry-level HR role and took a recruiter's advice to get an office admin job instead.
Matt McFarlane is the founder and director of FNDN, a compensation consulting practice for the startup and high-growth tech sector, based on the Gold Coast. He hosts the FNDN Series podcast, co-organised the inaugural Startup People Summit 2025 with over 45 speakers, and is a LinkedIn Top Voice in Australia. He is one of the HR Influence Awards Top 12 for 2026.
That recruiter's advice turned out to be the best career decision McFarlane didn't make for himself. Twelve months in an admin role gave him enough office experience to get his foot into HR, and from there his career moved quickly through generalist roles across legal, professional services, manufacturing, and other industries before landing in the space that stuck: high-growth tech.
"SaaS companies, in particular growing ones, you kind of have this opportunity to really put your fingerprints on a company and build some of these formative things that they've not had before," he says. "I just love that. I love the greenfields kind of environment."
That love of building from scratch kept pulling him toward earlier-stage companies. The bigger the blank canvas, the more engaged he became. But it was his final in-house role, at global HR platform Oyster, that changed the trajectory entirely.
At Oyster, McFarlane built the people function and compensation structure while the company scaled from 200 to 600 people spread across 70 countries. It was, by his own admission, the most extreme compensation challenge he will probably ever see.
"How do we handle compensation in one country, let alone 70?" he says, paraphrasing the questions his network was already asking him. "How do we tackle that?"
The experience taught him something that applies well beyond global pay structures. "You can't make assumptions about how things should work," he says. "You really have to intimately understand the needs of your people. You have to understand how things that you might expect to be the same need to be differentiated because of the cultural nuance that exists across these different regions."
It also confirmed what had been building quietly throughout his career. Compensation had been part of every role he'd ever held. Someone always had to own it, and it was usually him. At Oyster, all of that accumulated experience came into focus.
"It was like the cherry on top of compensation," he says. "I was like, okay, this is the most extreme I'm probably ever gonna see it."
McFarlane had always wanted to run his own business. He'd romanticised entrepreneurship, as he puts it, for years. But he's not technical, so a tech startup was out. Instead, he sat down and thought about what he genuinely loved doing. Compensation was at the top of the list.
The timing made sense. His network was already coming to him with questions. And the traditional big consulting firms weren't serving the startup market well. Early-stage companies with 30 or 50 people don't need a Deloitte engagement. They need someone who understands their speed, their constraints, and their specific flavour of chaos.
FNDN, which stands for 'foundation', helps startup and scale-up organisations build their first compensation structures. The things that will help them grow without pay becoming the headache it so often does.
Ask McFarlane about the biggest mistake founders make with pay and he doesn't hesitate. They think there's one magic number that solves everything.
"So often I spend my time working with organisations, helping them recognise that actually often it's very little to do with a number," he says. "It's kind of more to do with how the number is arrived at, how it's explained, how it's communicated, how people receive it and understand it and how they do that in relation to others around them as well."
He paints a picture that will feel familiar to anyone who has worked in a fast-growing company. A founder is trying to ship a product. A candidate says they want $150,000. The founder says yes immediately and moves on. Then the next hire for the same role asks for $170,000, and gets it. Two people doing identical work, paid drastically different amounts, who will inevitably find out about each other.
McFarlane calls it "people debt," a term that borrows deliberately from the tech world. "You're actually kind of embedding all of this people debt that is just going to resurface further down the line," he says. "Flexibility without structure can result in some of these real pain points and actually hamper your ability to deliver this killer product."
The fix, he argues, is not bureaucracy. It's doing formative thinking about pay structures early, in a way that doesn't slow hiring down but does prevent the compounding problems that come from making it up as you go.
McFarlane gets animated when the conversation turns to how the HR function is perceived inside organisations. He starts with Toby from The Office.
"Everyone knows who Toby from The Office is," he says. "He kind of sits in his back office. He only pops up when it's time for the mandatory training. He's only called in when there's a problem."
The issue, McFarlane argues, is that most people have seen more of Toby than they have of actual HR professionals doing actual strategic work. Popular culture has already conditioned them to expect the worst.
"They're already conditioned to believe that we're terrible. We're not their friend. We're not to be trusted," he says. "And here we are. And nine times out of 10, teams don't do a great job of actually broadcasting what it is that they're there to accomplish."
His solution is blunt. HR teams need to market themselves. Share what they're working on. Build a roadmap. Tell the business what they're here to achieve, and equally, what they're not here for. Stop letting the organisation define what it thinks HR does based on The Office and a few awkward compliance conversations.
"In many ways we already are strategic," he says. "We're just doing a really bad job of marketing it."
On culture, McFarlane takes a position that cuts against the standard playbook. Most companies spend their energy defining their values, their vision, what good looks like. He thinks they're missing half the picture.
"A lot of companies don't sit down and go, okay, well, if these are the values we expect to see, what's the opposite of that?" he says. "What are the ways that we don't want them to rear their head?"
Getting to that level of clarity, and involving the team in the process rather than imposing it from the top, is where culture becomes real. Not a poster on a wall. Not a slide in an onboarding deck. But an actual shared understanding of how people are expected to show up, and how they're not.
He's equally direct about the early warning signs when culture starts to drift. Don't wait for the dashboard. Don't wait for the turnover report.
"By the time you've seen turnover, it's too late," he says. "These people have walked out the door. You've lost that knowledge. You're having to replace them. You're bearing the cost."
The real signals, he says, are qualitative. They live in the undercurrent of conversation, in the things people flag informally. Organisations that listen well catch problems early. Organisations that wait for data are already behind.
When asked whether he's ever made a bad hire, McFarlane pauses. He doesn't like the term.
"Bad hire is such a challenging term," he says. "I would say I've hired people that I've either misled, or have had circumstances arise where they could no longer kind of fulfil the needs of the role."
Then he lands on the line that cuts through the noise.
"Almost nobody gets out of bed and goes, you know what, I'm gonna do a shit job today," he says. "Like these people don't really exist. People want to come to work, they want to be productive, they want to have a purpose, they want to enjoy the company of the people they're working with."
The problem, nine times out of ten, is miscommunication. A lack of clarity about what the role requires, how success is measured, what the team expects. The person labelled a "bad hire" usually just didn't have the information they needed to succeed.
Asked what advice he'd give his younger self, McFarlane fires off two answers quickly. First: let go of best-practice idealism when it can't prove its value to the business. "They might be your best practice," he says, "but are they the best thing for the business?"
Second: learn data analytics earlier. He calls it an underrated skill set that came to him too late. "If you can't dig beneath AI and understand how it's come to the answer, then gosh, I've seen so many horror stories of people who are like, I realised this dashboard that we built has actually been feeding us the wrong information."
But the third piece of advice is the one that lands hardest. He wishes he'd been a better advocate for himself.
"I think it's very easy for us as a profession to feel like we have to be impartial even about ourselves," he says. "Our own progression, our own development, what we pay. That mindset needs to be parked."
He pauses.
"You've got to go to bat for yourself because it's a lonely job. You spend all day thinking about everybody else. And I think you have to have that same headspace for yourself as well."
It's a fitting note to end on for someone who built a podcast, a consulting practice, a summit with 45 speakers, and a growing reputation as one of Australia's sharpest voices on compensation, all because he kept noticing gaps that nobody else was filling. McFarlane doesn't wait for someone else to build the thing that's missing.
He just builds it.
Matt McFarlane is Founder and Director of FNDN and the Startup People Summit. He is a 2026 HR Influence Awards Top 12 ANZ and LinkedIn Top Voices Australia 2025. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
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The HR Influence Awards 2026 Top 12 ANZ are presented by Compono.
Full details at hrinfluenceawards.com.au.