Year End Reflections and AI in Recruitment - Merry Christmas!

Well, it's Christmas. Yes. Christmas is around the corner and yet you can hear the music. We're nearly there. I'll turn it down a little bit. And Merry Christmas. There you go, the blueguard tree Christmas hat. That's it, we're done. I'm gonna turn this down a bit later. Thank you. Merry Christmas to all of you when you get this and hope you have a lovely Christmas and Happy New Year. We'll do another video before New Year. I wanted to release this video for, for you guys as I know a lot of you are shutting down for Christmas. Some of you on holidays. Maybe you're going to watch this then I hope this helps you year round. Clothes kicks in, attention goes elsewhere. There's not. There'll be another video next week, but not this time next week. I'm not going to do it on Christmas Day. I'll do a Boxing Day for you. I won't do that to you. See, I want to say this new week's newsletter, let's go back to that. First of all, before we get on to other topics. I see lots of people asking, I said, don't do that, don't ask for this. And this was about people asking for AI experience and technology and they want cognitive learning, they want all this stuff before in the past it was, everyone was asking for Excel, that's fine, but they wanted pivot tables, macros, vlookups, index matching. I was like, okay, that's a good thing to ask for at the time, 15, 20 years ago. But can you do it? People like, no, that's why I want someone. I said, well, if you can't do it, how do you measure it? Well, that's come round again because we've gone through blockchain and now we've gone all the way through, we're AI. And I did this earlier this year. I was delivering a session at a conference in Texas and asked anyone who had added AI or automation skills and abilities to their job specs, how many had every single hand right up? I was like, fair enough. Understand that said, could I ask from this room, how many of you can actually properly, genuinely assess the skills, AI skills of someone in an interview that you can do it yourselves and but I want you to keep your hands up, please. And slowly all the hands went back down. If you can't assess it properly, why make it then an essential skill? I can understand it being desirable and maybe it's something you want to look for when you're recruiting people and it's nice to have Is it? It's a great thing to have. I mean if you like. You've got a generation coming into treasury now. They've only ever known the Internet. It's always been there. They don't know what a fax machine is. A lot of them don't know what things like a cd, you know, they like. What are those things? This is Technology matters. The world is changing, but we need to be sensible how you guys hire for it. So that was one of the things. Don't hire for buzzwords as well because AI is also going to make it more difficult for a lot of people to actually screen out. That's why we exist. So when you're needing help wanting people to recruit for. That's why we help. We've got an interesting one coming up soon with one of my clients and he's interviewing or was interview has been interviewing recently and he was finding that actually the people that were answering his questions, he felt they were actually reading off an AI generated script. Yeah, that's a bit scary. They were answering the questions but when he dug under the surface they didn't have any. There wasn't anything there. It was like a lottery scratch card. Scratch once, then it was gone. Didn't win, no winners. So, yeah, it's one of the things. So that's one of the key things. Next week I want you to. I'll be talking about 2026 and not always pushing harder, doing more. Got to be better. Because I'm not convinced that's the right answer. But I'll explain more in next week's video, which will come out Boxing Day. So hopefully set you up for. Well, for the new year when you've got some space. So I want to thank you all for your support this year. You may have seen an announcement I made just yesterday across newsletters and videos, we went across, yeah, crazy. One million LinkedIn impressions in 2025. That never really mattered to me when I started doing them. That wasn't a thing. I didn't actually do it. It was because one of my LinkedIn social media coach encouraged me to share what I see from you guys in the market to do these videos. Do the newsletter on a Tuesday, video on a Friday. And at first I felt quite uncomfortable. Now I'm more used to it. I just do this all the time. The feedback showed me that it was what you guys actually wanted. So, yeah, a million impressions, the content's gone out and reached over 146, 000 people. Treasure professionals all over the world. And that's the bit I'm most proud of. I was asked when recently at a trade web event, someone said, oh, you're an influencer. I went, oh, felt really uncomfortable because I said that's not my intention. My intention. And I actually shared it with a couple of the other members of the group that were there. Said, I do this because I'm here to help. I do this because I'm sharing observations from conversations with you guys every week. I have hundreds of conversations a month with you guys every week. Every day. I'm talking to people on the podcast, I'm talking, I'm talking to candidates, I'm talking to clients and I'm taking little snippets from that. I'm resharing with you things to do, things not to do, do's and don'ts if you like, to help you about your next career step. That's one of the key things and actually and or to help you recruit more effectively and realistically in today's market. So we'll keep doing that, keep being successful. Maybe next year. 1.5 million. I don't know. Yeah, this I don't mind. I just do it. If you guys are enjoying it, share it with your friends. Share the newsletter and either way, I'll keep showing up. We'll keep showing up for you. Hope you have some proper time off after Christmas. Enjoy next week's video as we look towards next year. Thanks for being part of the community. I'll be back with the final video of 2025 Unboxing Day and look forward to grabbing a coffee and a chat with you guys in the new year in 2026. Thanks very much. Cheers.