# The City should hire on character again > Source: > Published: 2026-07-08 03:55:00+00:00 # The City should hire on character again *In a world of AI, character has never been more important. Employers and jobseekers should bring it to the forefront, writes Georgiana Bristol* Across offices in the City, rather than going to a junior colleague, people are now instinctively asking ChatGPT or Claude to make the first draft of a document or check the figures on a deck. Each time we do this, we’re making a rational decision that AI can do this work quicker and more accurately. But as environmentalists complain about how much electricity and water our AI habits are consuming, there’s less thought given to how we are, in part, quietly pulling up the first rung on the ladder of opportunity for our young people. Our [NEETs crisis](https://www.cityam.com/milburn-review-neets-crisis-costs-125bn-a-year-due-to-broken-system/) is shocking. More than a million young people in Britain are now not in education, employment or training, and six in 10 of them have never held a job at all. In the words of Alan Milburn, who is authoring the [government’s review](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/young-people-and-work-interim-report) into young people and work, this is a “lost generation”. Yet if you talk to employers, as we have at the Jobs Foundation for our new report Jobs and Education, a more hopeful picture emerges. Speaking with firms like Allica Bank and EY, they told us that they are increasingly hiring young people on attitude and potential, rather than grades or degrees. What businesses are looking for is character, the willingness to learn, the resilience to fail and try again, the curiosity to ask a better question, the reliability to turn up and see a task through. These are the qualities that Claude can’t learn. ## AI is raising the value of human skills As AI absorbs the routine technical tasks, the human contribution left in a job is much more based on judgement, adaptability and the ability to work well with other people. An employer taking on a first hire is not buying a fixed set of skills, many of which will be out of date within a few years anyway; instead they are buying the capacity to keep learning and to keep adding value as the work itself changes around them. The City used to run on character. Success on the floor of the old trading floor wasn’t based on your degree or your qualification, but instead on your energy, drive and charisma. In short, your character. But as we moved away from the bustle of the trading floor to the quiet detail of spreadsheets, suddenly this wasn’t quite so important. In many ways, AI is turning us back to the qualities that we once prioritised. But the problem which runs through the evidence in our report is that too many of our hiring processes still screen for the wrong thing. We filter on qualifications and keywords, and in doing so, we overlook the young people who have plenty of the character employers actually want and few of the credentials our systems reward. A CV can tell you what someone has been taught, but it struggles to tell you who they are. That gap is costing both sides – the employer who misses a good hire and the young person who never gets a foot in the door. ## Character can be built Of course, knowledge and technical skills are still vital – AI isn’t replacing humans (at least not yet!) – and young people should still learn them. But increasingly, we have the wrong emphasis when hiring. Whilst looking for firsts from Oxford or Cambridge, we’ve often treated character as a soft extra beside the hard currency of grades. Employers understand this instinctively, which is why the smartest of them are already changing how they recruit. Our schools, our training systems and a good deal of public policy have yet to catch up. It’s also important to remember that character isn’t a fixed inheritance that some young people are lucky enough to be born with and others are not. It is built. Resilience, reliability and the habit of seeing something through can be taught – whether that be in a classroom, on a work placement, in a first job with an employer willing to take a chance. When given responsibility, young people can grow into themselves and thrive. That’s the opportunity in front of us, and a reason that our NEETs crisis shouldn’t become permanent. Today’s young people don’t lack what the modern economy needs, but our systems have been measuring the wrong thing. If we recognise that character is what matters most, the world of work suddenly becomes less daunting for young people. Our task is to develop in young people the human qualities machines cannot touch, and to build hiring processes that can actually see them, because competing with machines on their own terms is a race we will lose. Get that right, and the generation we have been so quick to write off becomes the generation best equipped for the world AI is creating. [Georgiana Bristol is chief executive of the Jobs Foundation](https://thejobsfoundation.com/)