The Treasury Recruitment Market in 2022 & 2023 – USA

Foreign. So welcome to this episode of our Treasury Career Corner. But it's one of our reviews of the market, if you like. We decided to split it out. So Craig talked about the uk, Katie, you can head over to her European episode and she can talk about the state of the market with Europe. Now Katie gets to, well, she gets to grab the microphone herself and, you know, she gets all the power. So she's going to quiz me a little bit on the US market. Done a lot in the US this year, really exploding. I mean, it's a huge market, you know, West Coast, east coast and, you know, place people out with Streamland Media on the west coast through to Magnite as well up there and a few other really great clients who have, you know, we've helped and right away across the East Coast. So, yeah, enjoying it, but it has been hard work. But I'll shut up for a second. Let Katie, you hand it over to you. What, what do you want to know about the people are asking.

Well, obviously you graced the USA with your presence a couple months ago at afp. I guess for the, for the listeners, what were the key takeaways for you from there regarding the state of the market in the USA for Treasury?

Well, the way I've described it a little bit, the, the UK market, I don't want to answer the question, but the UK market has been, you know, bubbling along, getting better post Covid and really starting to warm up and get back to normal. And then European market, we've both been very busy, you know, I've been helping you. We've done a lot of stuff with like, cars like Porsche, guys like Chanel, right the way across Europe, but for the us, you know, and I described it again when I was out at the Dublin conference recently. They said, oh, what's the US like? I went, it's on fire, you know, it's white hot. The salaries are going there. There are a host of jobs. We're recruiting for a couple of clients in Texas at the moment. And it's, it's challenging, I would say it's once the market, there are lots and lots of opportunities. There are also lots of candidates who are interested in a move, but they're interested in improving their current situation. Well, we've seen, post Covid, they've been, you know, they've just operated for two years, working from home, working from the home office, working remotely, whatever you like to call it. And now offices are starting to open and some of the senior staff are saying, oh, well, I live around the corner I'm going to get back in, you know, And I know of a couple of examples where the offices are reopening. In New York, for instance. Now the treasury managers that are there and have just said, yeah, actually we work really well from home for two years. And they each have, you know, an hour and a half to get into the office, hour and a half to get back. Well, their CEOs, they've got a five minute walk to the office they live in down, you know, they're in Manhattan so they can just wander down, grab their Starbucks and then they go. Whereas these guys are saying, well, hang on, I'm now going to go back to traveling for three hours. And they're saying, do you know what, I don't need that anymore. And they are then saying, either they want a job that's closer to them where there is less travel or more flexible working, and that's flexible. It's not 100% remote working. But they are happy to go in, say one, maybe two days where they want that social thing, they want to be meeting people. But I'm found that with clients, I'm having to coach them, I'm having to say, right, you want them back in? And they're like, yeah, yeah, we want to get the team back together. Really? Why? And they're like, well, because everyone wants to be together. I went, do they really though? I spoke to the NACT American Group of Treasurers. Amazing audience there. You had people like Patrick McCarten, the global treasurer for Caterpillar. He's an upcoming podcast guest@treasurycareercorner.com so great guy. So by the time this comes out, a lot of you guys will be able to access that podcast. But when he was on that call as well, we were talking about a lot of them getting back into the office. And then when we said, well, you're back in the office now five days a week, but how much are you seeing your team? And they said, oh yeah, well, I'm seeing all my banking guys. I'm going out to the business, I'm doing this. Okay, so how much are you seeing your team? They're like, oh yeah. It turned out for some of them, they seem to be seeing their team less even though they're back in the office. You know, they're being pulled left and right and everything else. And it was, it was quite an interesting discussion we had on that. So I think that also, you know, we know if a role comes up in the US and it says remote working, you just got A crazy amount of response. I mean, we get. Got this for a couple of our clients when we did Magnite and a couple of others. You know, they, they want people, they're happy for people to come into the office, say one week out of four, you know, so go there. I know Leanne, who was on, as you said, shared a stage with me at afp. You know, she works and she does, you know, goes to the office like once a month or so and, and fills up her four or five days. There's a crazy week there, and then goes back and works 100 remote. Amazing lady. But the great thing is she's proved that she doesn't need to be there all the time.

I guess that's not. I know that you and I have had conversations where actually the whole hybrid working in the States is very, very different to what I have in, in Europe. So you've got sort of two extremes. So there's obviously the middle bit, which is the general kind of hybrid working. But sometimes you've got clients that are saying to you, okay, I want somebody fully remote. But then on the other extreme you've got clients who have said, well, actually I've got this role, but I want somebody who's 100% based in, in the office.

Yeah.

I mean, what's driving those extremes, would you say?

I think the first thing is holding on to old ways. Yeah, Just, just not moving on, not moving with the times, not getting the heads around it going. Do you know what we prove that we don't have to be here all the time. So why do the same thing again? I think that's the key thing. The first thing that like you want to sort of give them a, a notional slap if you like, and say, right, do you really need to be in there? And I think actually the ones that I'm seeing who are more successful, I don't know if it answers the question. You can perhaps rephrase it and, and quiz me harder. But more, I think it's those guys that do realize actually we can get the same results by being in the office two days a week. That's all we need to do. I mean, I know I'm going on about it, but it's true because also a noticing again, this relates to salaries as well. Salaries at the moment in the U.S. i know the cost of living has gone up. I know there's inflation there as well, but there's like hyper inflation of salaries in the U.S. you know, she mentioned.

They'Ve rocketed this year. Yeah. And is that across all levels or.

Yes, across all levels. I'm also seeing there's that post Covid bump. We talked about it on your episode when we talked about Europe, that now people are catching up with salaries. You know, they weren't. You were working from home, you weren't getting a job review. You were just about doing a job before two, three years ago. Whereas now coming out of COVID people are seeing each other. People are now starting to review their salaries and go, oh, actually, I want to catch up now. And I've still got increased pricing, you know, increased energy costs, increase everything. So actually, my salary needs to go up. Please. Now. You know, I have seen that across the U.S. talk to Craig Jeffries, strategic treasurer, a great guy, but he was quizzing me a little bit about our first salary survey, treasurysalary.com and we ran a snapshot earlier this year. So it was sort of end of Q2, but that was with about five, I think about 600 people. But now we've given Craig the responsibility. He's driven that we're about to go over the thousand people mark for the salary survey. Mental. As we approach the end of Q4, the great thing is it's showing, you know, the disparity as well. That's one of the things we will do in future salary surveys where we look at the cost of living, you know, the cost of someone in, say, New York and their salary is higher than, you know, say, if they're down in Texas, less taxes and less everything else, and lower costs, everything else versus west coast. Out in California, when I recruited for one of our clients out there, streamlined media, they were saying, well, maybe we, if we base them in California, what's the salary? I went, it's this level. And they're like, wow, okay. I said, but if we do that as a remote working person, I said, it drops to this because there aren't the added costs. You don't have to have that person in there, you know, and they're all right. Yeah, it's great. And I think that flexibility is the key thing. So that's. As we move into 2023, that's one of the key things people need to look at. They need to show flexibility. And, you know, the other bit was, which is great, was it's quite weird to be asked. It was a real consultative process with Gary at Stream now, because he was saying, mike, tell me about this. How do we do this? What do we do? How do we, you know, And I'm like, whoa, okay. I was really being consulted. And it was literally stretching me. You know, I felt like a bit like one of those Harry Potter things where they're pulling ideas out your head. I just. It was great, and it stretched me as a consultant. But, you know, that's what I would say to clients. Call us, you know, if you're a candidate, call us. Send me your resume, send me your questions. We'll answer them on the podcast. We'll keep your names private, but we'll give you the advice you need about what the market's doing.

Yeah. Do you think that the clients are seeking your consultative approach? Because obviously, we do have the salary survey. We do have podcasts. We are sort of at conferences and at the heart of all of these conversations that happen. So are you sort of seeing in America particularly, that, you know, they want to get your insight, they want your advice, because they want that flexibility to get the right person?

They do. But the weird thing is they still don't understand what we do. And it's like, that's why we're doing the podcast. That's why we do the salary. That's why we do all these initiatives to try and explain to people. You know, one of the guys, I had a previous is Chris McConaughey. Now he's an English guy who's moved across the national grid. CFO over there. Really good guy. And he was actually very gushing, and it was really nice. It was very touching. But he was saying, look, there is no one doing what you're doing out here. There's no one offering this level of service advice and going out to clients. And that's all we do. You know, someone the other day said, oh, can you help us with this kind of roll? No. Nice. And I gave them two or three recommendations when, as long as it's treasury, we are that inch wide, mile deep. And they were saying, oh, because we want advice, a Treasury analyst, and we might set it up. And then when we do this, we're gonna have a group treasurer or global treasurer, rather, and then we're gonna do this. And I said, yeah, we can help all those. Oh, wait, do all those. Yeah, we do all those levels. But it was. It was nice to sort of be consulted. And the, you know, people are still going, ah, so you just do treasury, right? And we're like, yeah, that's why it says the treasury recruitment company. That's all we do. You want us to do stuff. You know, we can't do gutters or anything else. We just do treasury recruitment. That's all we do. Yeah, it's, it's an interesting one. I'm looking forward actually. You know, you and I have talked about, you know, in 2023, 2022, I did a number of conferences. I did AFP, which was amazing, and met a number of people out there. Great session with Leanne Perkins and Joel Campbell. We've also got that conversation coming up between the two of them when we talked and you know, talks about profile and personal brand and what they've done. They're, they're great exponents of that and stuff. In addition, next year, looking to go back to the Windy City Summit, hopefully in Chicago, looking also t man in New York, looking also towards the end of the year, heading back to AFP and it'll be in San Diego. So take my surfboard, who knows.

So I guess sort of this year it's been busy in the States. You've seen salaries on the app, you have seen the mix in terms of working from home. And there's a piece around sort of educating clients and advising clients, I guess for the people listening, you know, if they're interested in moving sort of next year, what do they need to do?

Send us, you know, even it's just a, a LinkedIn conversation. Even if it's just a. Yeah, it's just, what's the word? It's just, just reach out, you know, just. Yeah, drop us a line on LinkedIn, drop us an email. We'll hop on a call if you've got a particular need. We've got a couple of amazing roles coming through with actually us clients at the moment, which is fantastic. One in particular, he's a brand new treasurer and he wanted advice about job descriptions. I was like, yeah, no problem. Oh, and I need to benchmark the salaries. Went, yep, we got that. And he's like, okay, and we need to agree terms. Yeah, we can do that. So actually what we've done, he's now focusing well, he's now assessing what he's got in place and he's looking at the operations, getting to know everyone, seeing what's happening, knowing he's got us in his back pocket, that when he needs to sort of pull the trigger and say, yeah, off you go guys, we got everything in place. And he's knowing that what he's doing. We were talking about him having people in the office a couple of days a week and I was like, yeah, great idea. And he said, oh, do you know, will it reduce if I, if I said everyone back in five days. So of course it will. I said, you probably won't get the best candidates because the best candidates will vote with their feet, either coming in the door for an interview or won't show up. You know, we'll say, no, I'm not interested, thanks. So, you know, it's a different kind of world. But again, it's about that contact thing. That's why we do this podcast as well, to reach out to people and say we do treasury in America, call us. And if you need advice about recruiting, call us or email or whatever. And it just means that, you know, that's why we go to the conferences and I meet all these amazing treasury professionals. Oh, when you do this podcast? Yeah, the podcast got a hundred thousand downloads, so people love hearing the story of other treasurers. So, you know, go to treasurycareercourtner.com We've got some incredible ones. I was just actually looking, just whilst we were talking before, we had Joel Campbell as Leanne, I said Rick Barrett from Rotary, who else have we got? Sue Cuts, Just amazing. Amal, Ben Loper from Hilton Grand Vacation, Tim Hessler, Todd Yoda. Yeah, amazing from Fluor, love him. Great guy. John Engerman, just, I mean some of the names, you know, you've got Broadridge, you got Dana Laidhold, used to be at Peloton, now at Nasdaq, Re interviewed her, which is great. Rebecca from Kraft Heinz, we had Gavin Moore from Wendy's. Brilliant interview, been there for many years. And we, we talked about why that's kept him. Bruce Edlund, you know, you see him on the conference circuit, lovely guy. And you know why Hybrid is here to stay and yeah, just go on there, just enjoy it. And I hope you've enjoyed today. And I mean my wrap up words are, yeah, call us. That's my closing words.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Hello, it's Mike here again. I hope you enjoyed this week's show. If you did, then maybe you want to follow the show or subscribe, depending.

On where you listen.

It's totally free and means that you'll be the first to see each and every week when we release a new show. And maybe whilst you're there, you could even leave a quick review. Reviews and ratings are among the most important metrics for a podcast to effectively rank. And as you can probably appreciate, the.

Podcast is a lot of hard work.

To produce every week. It'd be amazing. Just take, say 20 seconds, leave a quick review of my amazing guests and their great career stories. We'd really appreciate it. Thanks very much. And I can't wait to see you.

Sa.