Treasury Trends and Strategies for 2025 How to Stay Ahead and Succeed in an Employers Market

So welcome to. This is the video section of our Treasury Career Corner Live End of Year podcast. So if you're listening, I hope you're enjoying it. You've heard Katie and I just talk about what we've seen globally. So we then also touched on uk, Europe and the us Now I'm joined by Joe Grabowski. We're recording this bit live, so you can actually go to our YouTube channel if you want to their Treasury TV. You can see us chatting. If you enjoy YouTube more than you do listening over there, we've got a face of radio. But anyway, let's move on past that bit, Joe, let's dive into it. So 2024, what's it been like? We'll come to 2025 and what you've seen. So yeah, what's it been like?

Yeah, 2024, it's interesting, right? I think it's been busy, but it's also been rough for both people looking to hire and people looking for jobs. Really what I think is you're seeing a shift from an employee's market, which we've probably seen a little bit post Covid all the way until probably mid last year, more toward an employer's market. And really what that ripple effect has or the downstream impact of this is budgets have been tight across the organization. So now you have treasurers who are fighting for roles headcount on their team, whether it's new headcount trying to replace people who've left the organization or have been promoted internally. On that same note, you also have. Well, treasury people are analytical to begin with, but now you have almost a fear that you might not get a second shot at this if you make the wrong hire. So you have some treasurers who are being a little bit more critical or going over potential candidates with a more of a fine tooth comb than maybe you've seen in the past. From there, you also the other way that it plays into this is the recruiting market in 2023 and in 2024 was brutal. So you've seen a tunnel.

What do you mean by that? Do you mean from a. If you're a candidate looking for a role or do you mean if a client trying to seek talent?

Just you. Basically what you've had is layoffs started in the recruiting space in 2023 and continued into this year. Right. So you look at it from a staffing industry perspective. Just in the US it's down 10% overall in 2023 and it's still trending that way. In 2024 we have a week left. I don't think there's much ground to be made up there. But what that means is now all of a sudden you have these tight budgets. You have smaller recruiting teams for the people who are supporting these treasurers who are looking to hire. That means they're also split across other areas of finance, maybe they're split across it, corporate functions, whatever it may be. So now you have a team that's stretched thin. You have a specialty skill set, and customer service is just. It's hurting on both sides because of it. Treasurers aren't getting people or quality people as quickly as they'd like. People who are involved in the process, decisions are taking longer. These timelines are being drawn out. It's never going to move as quickly as a job seeker would like it to move. But they might also have other opportunities. So treasurers are losing out on good talent because of lack of efficiency within the organization, which is also caused by a team that has just been pretty much bombarded over the last couple of years or shred through and again.

And I think it's a great point because Katie and I spoke earlier about the fact that we had recruit to replace. That was what we were seeing. One person leaves, you cover it, you recruit to replace again, second person, you need to recruit that person. But then you give this treasury job description to an HR person that's going, what's treasury like? They've got nine other requisitions on. They might have 20 other requisitions. They're suddenly throwing this specialist job and then they come to us and say, oh, I put it on LinkedIn and I've had a hundred responses. And you go, yeah, and you're calling us. Yeah. So we pretty much know that you haven't been successful. And you think that. Now, the good thing is we know the talent, we know the people that are looking to move.

Yeah.

For that career step, as you say. I think that they are still being. If you're in that position, that's where we're adding the value. And we would say that, but how would you justify that, if you like?

The other part to it, too is because you have this reduced headcount. Now all of a sudden you're trying to pack more and more skill sets into just one simple role. So now all of a sudden, maybe you're looking for aspects of fpa, you're looking for aspects of accounting, and that's not Treasury. At the end of the day, there are people out there who possess all of those skill sets, but it's just compounding on top of itself where you have tight budgets. Most internal recruiting HR teams do not have the ability to work with external vendors simply because they're already under the microscope for their budgets. They've already been slashed, they're trying to save costs. They don't want to be additional overhead. And then now you have a specialized skill set that might be combined with another specialized skill set and you don't have anyone on the other side of the desk saying, hey, wait, this doesn't sound right.

A quick solution is it just simply just call us. And I think it would be, I would say I had a call with a Treasury with a HR person the other day and they've got a Treasury role. And I said, look, I think you can do this one yourselves. And they're like, what? Really? I said, yeah. I said it's good, easy. Treasury analyst role. I think they could get some good people. And I actually said, look, go to the market. I said, if it was a more specialist role, they're quite a specialist company. And I won't say who because I think we will get the vacancy later on. But I said, you might get that person. You need to go and follow this process. Go through the process. These are the things to look out for. Okay. They were like I was coaching them. I said, I don't care about getting paid yet. I said, the fact is I think you might find the person, but you can then go to your cfo, your treasurer, and say, I've tried it. With Mike's advice, we didn't succeed. We need to do it on a contained search basis. We'll give Mike some money, he'll go find the person. Great. And they're, oh, okay. That's what you'll see.

Well, that's, that goes into the, the data points as well. Right. Like the treasury salary survey, that's crucial because that's real time information. It's not from a salary.com. these are specific treasury practitioners that are giving you a reflection of the market around you. And that's a lot of the coaching that we do here in the US And I'm sure it's true on your side of the business or your side of the pond as well. But it's, we're spending a lot of time just coaching people on the misalignment between what they're looking for and what actually exists in the market and trying to level set expectations to find a match between the two.

And I also was interviewed on the Strategic Treasurer podcast recently. We'll put A link to that in the show Notes and really good conversation with Craig Jeffrey. He was particularly quizzing on US Salaries, how they compared. So don't really compare to European. It's very different with the tax and everything else, higher taxes in the US Salaries. So more comes in and more goes out in different ways and different baskets. But there was that side of things. But then also I explained to him we are shifting our salary survey a bit, moving it from we were doing the end of Q1, end of Q3, doesn't really fit with people's schedules a little bit. So we're going to make it half yearly, run it in January and July just to fit in with our treasury folks. That's what they want. So let's do it. So we're going to rerun that bit more work for us, but I think that's going to be better salaries. What have you seen from your side that you've noticed? Because we'll come back to the placement we've recently made. What have you seen salaries wise?

It's been a mix, to be perfectly honest. You still have the misalignments between the skill sets and titles and salary. But then you also we've run into a fair number of companies that are like coaches on the market. Tell us what we need to pay or they'll at least look to us for guidance. They're open to being coached. And those are the, the people, at least in my experience, that seem to be a little bit more serious about hiring. You have the tire kickers, what I'll call them, the people who are like, yeah, we're going to throw a dart in the dartboard and just hope that we hit a bullseye. And then you have the people who actually want to take a more strategic approach to this and make sure that they're entering the market the right way. Because when you look at this, there's two sides of this equation. You're trying to get people in the door, but you're also trying to keep them. And this market, it is an employer market right now. Who knows how long that's going to hang on for? But as soon as that flips, you're risking attrition if you're not in line with the market and if you're not treating your team well.

Yeah. And then I mentioned that we recently made a really great placement in New York, which we'll be able to announce early in the new year. But that came from Treasury Curriculum Alive, didn't it? As well. We're finally, it's actually it works.

Who would have thought, Live alive networking and having relationships that we've developed over all these years pay off. But yeah, that's. And honestly, that's a tip. If you're a practitioner listening to this and sitting in the market because there are so many people in the market, this is the first year, I think, that I've heard in quite some time where I've actually run into a fair number of people who. They've been laid off, they've been impacted by reorganizations, something like that. And sorry, I know this is a little bit off topic, but it's. If you're looking for that job, if you find yourself in that situation, because there are so many people in this market looking. That's why you can't rely on LinkedIn or anything like that. Mike mentioned it earlier. If you're getting hundreds of applications, you're bound to get caught up in the wash and not even noticed. That's where the networking comes in. And that's when you mentioned the networking piece and the relationships that we have. I gotta throw that out there for anybody listening is make sure you're maintaining your network, checking in with your network, that's gonna be your best shot in an employer's market to landing a role and being able to stand out from the crowd.

And if only U.S. treasury professionals could come to any of six free events that we're running in 2025, we've done the same. In fact, we did a few more this year. Not US wise. We've got six events we're going to do. I'm doing New York, actually, the first one in New York, end of March, then potentially texpo, then Kyriba Live, then AFP Boston and a couple of others, doing a couple more Texas and a couple more Chicago, I think, and then we've got a UK and European events. And actually we did our last London one the other day and everyone was like 100 plus people in the room. Two amazing treasures. Treasure of Porsche, Treasurer Tesco. And then everyone got to network and they were like doing the networking. Oh, wow, this is great. And they're not getting it through their associations. They're going. Actually, we're putting on. We love doing it because then we're getting the clients, we're getting the candidates and we're enjoying it because I'm actually meeting the treasury folk out there and catching up with yourself. You came to the last one as well in our New York session, which is going to be great. And as we say, that made it last time, didn't it, it did.

And when you think about it, people are showing up to these events, number one, to learn and hear the stories of people who are sitting in the treasure seat.

Right.

The other half to that is if you're showing up to a networking event, you know that you're there to network. It's easy to ignore a cold outreach on LinkedIn. It's easy to ignore a cold email. You have someone's full attention. People aren't sitting at these events just down there with their heads buried in their phone. Right. These are people who are actively looking to build their networks in the treasury space. Not to. I guess we will make it a pitch for the live events. Right. These are networking events. These are for like minded professionals who want to build their networks within Treasury.

And well, when I spoke on stage at AFP Nashville, one of the points I made, it was one of my closing slides, if you like, was the word networking. It's yes, it's great to have a beer, yes, it's great to socialize, but it's in the middle of that word. It's like net working. And it was like work. And I said don't just think, oh great and come here, sit here, be prepared to work at it. And it's great. The people that did two or three people have said to me from the New York event, they've actually caught up and expanded their own networks with some of the people they met, two or three different groups like these spider grabs or the boom, which is great because actually they're getting better connections, they've got more people on their LinkedIn so that's why we do it and maybe hope. I'm hopefully we'll announce the sponsor soon, but I think that could really help us as well.

Absolutely. That's, that's people helping people and just again trying to help build businesses, build networks and build teams at the end of the day.

So I'm going to wrap up, I'll let you do your wrap up words and I'm going to do my final wrap up to camera with you there as well. You'll wrap up for. Actually, yeah, for this year, next year. What are we thinking? We've got all the events, everything else.

Yeah, yeah, obviously we have the events. Outside of that, I'm in the market every day along with you. We're talking to treasury practitioners, we're talking to people looking to hire treasury practitioners. I look at this as I know you've been in business for 20 some odd years. I don't want to age you here but 26 now.

26.

All right, 26. You wanted to throw a number out there, so here we are. But I still look at this as a startup in the us to be perfectly honest, and I know there's a lot of territory to cover here. There's a lot of relationships to be made. There's a lot of people to talk to. That's that day one mentality that I'm taking into 2025 is just approaching it, pedal to the metal, seeing what we come up with.

In the end, I think for me, 2025 is a few different things. Obviously, the business, we continue to grow with the placements. We do the networking, live events to meet treasurers, to meet treasury candidates, to help find you new roles, new positions, new. And help you build your networks. But also we do the other bits. We do the salary server. We talked@treasurysalary.com got here, lovely podcast, which people are watching. But the fact is there's someone, every time, every week, we get someone else sign up to the podcast and go, oh, wow, what? Treasury Career corner. It's there. 300, over 350, 360 podcasts with treasurers, great back catalog, and you can listen to their stories. Sign up there and stuff. And until I see you next year, mate, thank you very much.

Absolutely. Happy holidays.

Thank you. Cheers.