thanks @EricAlexander, your comment to keep looking at the JS helped though, i was looking at them but didn't really see it till I came and saw it with fresh eyes and it all made sense.

@EricAlexander thanks, I think I have found it. Now to work out what the hell the JS is doing

Thank you. I am on paternity leave now but will try this when I get back!

I am trying to get the lowest management overheads possible. I thought that the anniversary date approach would be the best but as I could not get this to work I have tried the list approach (which does have some benefits). I have queried based on path but the results only show disp.aspx forms, not the people search results. I tried to create a new people based result source based on path for this list but this returned nothing

I was trying to get it to do it via date, that way no user input would be required. But struggled to do this and thought a list might be a better quicker option