Like many, I suspect you’ll be glad to see the back of 2025. At times it’s been a deeply troubling year — politically, economically, socially — and it hardly needs spelling out that many global events have put our own day-to-day challenges into perspective.

Still, the turn of the year is always a useful moment to pause, reflect, and take a few lessons forward — both personally and professionally.

From a recruitment perspective, it’s been a flaky market. The recent Budget didn’t quite provide the shot of optimism many had hoped for. That said, we’re getting busier, and a couple of themes have emerged from recent work that feel worth sharing.

For candidates: find ways to make loyalty pay.

Earlier this year, a client was choosing between several very similar candidates in terms of experience and capability. The deciding factor ended up being cost. The successful candidate hadn’t moved roles for some time and therefore hadn’t benefited from the salary uplifts that often come with job changes. That’s not to suggest anyone should be job-hopping every 18 months — far from it — but knowing your true market value is incredibly powerful. And if you have moved roles frequently for good reasons, being able to articulate those moves clearly and positively really matters.

For clients: don’t be seduced by false economies.

We recently worked with a scale-up looking to strengthen its FP&A capability. With a small HR team, they felt they could manage the hire themselves. Unfortunately, the brief — skills, target audience, and salary — wasn’t quite right, and progress stalled. They eventually turned to a recruiter in frustration. The outcome was fine in the end, but the process would have been quicker, easier, and less costly had specialist support been used from the outset.

In other cases, we see founders rely purely on instinct for roles as critical as CFO. Sometimes that gut decision works. Sometimes it leads to someone being too expensive, mis-skilled, or culturally disruptive. Either way, Pitch Hill Partners will never judge — and we certainly won’t pester. We open the door. If you want to test the water first, that’s often a healthy thing. Relationships matter more than targets.

To support both clients and candidates, we’ve launched our Education Centre this year. It’s designed to make recruitment more transparent and less daunting — from practical guides to lighter-touch service options that suit early-stage, cost-conscious businesses right through to more established organisations with in-house teams.

Our ambition remains simple: to be the most trusted business in our space.

We nurture relationships, not transactions. We support clients who want to try things themselves, and we help candidates position themselves positively in what can be a demanding — and at times unforgiving — jobs market.

I’ll happily take that mindset into 2026.

Wishing you a wonderful festive break, and I look forward to speaking in the New Year.

Best,

Ray

Things to do...

***Now...***
**Rev up your CV.**
You don’t need to be thinking about a move: fine tuning your CV while you’ve stepped back for the festive season is a chance to reflect on what you’ve added to your ‘experience’ section this year… and what you *really* want next.

***Next...***
**AI talking points.**
The talk is when the AI bubble bursts, not if. If it’s sooner rather than later (and hits the real economy), what will you say to recruiters, colleagues, your team? Showing confidence in adversity is always valuable.

***Later...***
**The Midterms.**
No, we’re not suddenly a US newsletter. But at the back end of 2026, the midterm elections could spell upheaval in politics over the pond. There are up- and down-sides to a curtailed Trump. Time to research...

Lies, damned lies, and...

The 32% AI gap

Reality seems to be catching up with the AI sceptics. Conventional wisdom now has it that development of LLM models has slowed to a crawl, and some of the fundamental problems with agentic AI (essentially, trust in autonomous systems) makes rapid adoption too risky.

One fascinating lens on this is the finding that while “51% of midmarket CFOs believe they have fully adopted AI within finance; however, only 19% of their FCs agree, according to the survey data” – as reported by the-cfo.io. It’s not even the usual “we can report big AI numbers because we paid for the Copilot enterprise licence.” This seems to be senior figures assuming something such as strategic analysis is “automated” – but those producing it know it’s still people and spreadsheets all the way down.

Copilot might already in all our productivity apps, but the latest news is that Microsoft thinks no-one is using it. (When it tries to help, it often just gets in the way. Yes, we remember Clippy’s “it looks like you’re trying to write a letter…” prompts.) And with agentic AI (currently) failing to complete most of the tasks set it. This long-read on people whose jobs were hit by AI is fascinating, in that in most cases it looks like AI was an excuse to “right size” the business or simply cut costs by cutting services.

This is shaping up to be a theme for 2026: by all means look for the pinch-points and productivity hacks that AI can offer – providing you have proper AI governance guiderails and they are well understood and applied. But chill on the AI revolution talk.

And, crucially, don’t recruit assuming that some class of skill has been made redundant by AI. The truth is that even if a machine can perform a task, we’re a long way off being able to trust them doing it right every time – so you need people around you, and in junior roles, who know how it all works, and can show others where the AI gets it wrong.

On trend

New Years Resolutions

New Year’s Resolutions

We all know they’re made to be broken, but at least making New Year’s Resolutions shows you where you want to make positive changes in your life. Here are three of mine (in a professional context!):

Create time for the things that matter.

The work on the education centre at the Pitch Hill Partners web site is effectively streamlining our inbound marketing. 2025 was all about SEO – and that’s worked really well. But being a boutique means our USP is long-term relationships, not pitching. So in 2026, we’ll aim to open the door and make it easy to come in, rather than shouting in the street – freeing time for proper conversations and getting to know you all better. Top Tip: I’m using HubSpot to optimise web site traffic and contact management. It’s great!

Run your winners, cut your losers. I’ve spoken to four or five people this month alone who feel they’ve joined the wrong business, and they’re worried about the look on their CV. Some recruiters are unsympathetic about horrible colleagues or terrible situations hidden during recruitment – and I think that’s wrong. We should understand when people have short stints – it’s often for perfectly good reasons. We should apply market logic: if the situation isn’t right, get out.

Keep reading. I’ve mentioned a few books like year – Memos from the Chairman by Alan Greenberg, They ask you answer by Marcus Sheridan – so this isn’t a ‘standing start’ resolution. But the world is so interconnected, and so many people specialise so deeply these day, that being widely read around your field can be such a big differentiator.

Words from the wise

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Looking back, looking forward

The end of the year is good for review, of course. (We liked the approach by Phoebe Stamford-Moroz, deputy company secretary at Rentokil Initial: “between Christmas and New Year, I get a really nice box of chocolates, finish off the Christmas champagne and just write out my personal and professional goals for the next year…”)

But if you’re swamped with flashbacks from what’s been in many ways a really terrible, depressing year of news, we can recommend journo-turned-entrepreneur Tom Whitwell’s “52 things I learning in 2025”. He’s been doing this annual grab-bag since 2014, and as a smart guy with varied interests, it offers some unusual, topical and occasionally uplifting nuggets to see you through the festive period. Our top three off-the-wall factoids this year?

In the UK, water companies and offshore rigs communicate by bouncing radio waves off trails created by millions of small meteorites as they burn up in the atmosphere. [Meteor Communications Ltd]
First names affect how you are perceived at work. ‘Anna’ and ‘Joseph’ are consistently considered trustworthy, honest and reliable, while ‘Victoria’ and ‘Ryan’ are considered competitive, ambitious and extrovert. [Susanna Grundmann & Co]
The decoy effect in pricing (where adding a third, overpriced, option can encourage people to make a more expensive choice) has been validated by a study of 3.6 million wine purchases in a British supermarket. [Tom Stafford]

And a “hat tip” to journalist Charles Arthur, whose excellent Overspill daily email flags Tom’s list up every year. You can subscribe to that here. And it’s via that newsletter that we found an extra nugget: Derek Thjompson’s “26 ideas for 2026, organized under the themes that I think will drive economics, politics, and technology in the near future”. It’s a little less off-the-wall than Whitwell’s, and a bit more predictable (well, it is a predictions article…) but allowing for a US focus, there are some interesting trends to accommodate here.