My First Year Working at Aston Martin

As I reach my first year at Aston Martin, and we gear up for another big year of talent acquisition, I thought I would write about the attributes the company looks for when assessing and hiring candidates in response to being asked this question many times.

For any of us fortunate enough to be employed at Aston Martin we know this is a special company to work for.

Lots of things make it special - people, culture, values, diversity and let’s not forget the fantastic and unique cars that we make.

We talk about a hire/develop/retain model, so our objective is to hire the best people, give them interesting career pathways to develop them, and then if we do both of these well, we retain most of these great employees in the medium to long term. As the company grows, they grow with us.

We can see the pride that people have working for the company, with low attrition, and part of that relates to being an Aston Martin person.?Over 100 roles were filled internally last year, either through promotions or people moving internally to a new role.?One of my team moved into a completely different role in HR, which we call a “Zig-Zag career”, moving to a very different team and being trained up where there are significant gaps in a person’s experience.

It all fits in to the talent philosophy, which is keeping talented people in the company and giving each person meaningful and fulfilling career options.

As a talent acquisition team, we look for certain things that make someone a great hire.?A major focus is people who share our values and demonstrate that they live these all the time. We can teach skills and develop people’s abilities, but it’s much harder, if not impossible, to teach attitudes.?Attitudes + Behaviours = Culture, or A + B = C.

We have high standards so it should be difficult to get a job here, and we don’t apologise for that,?In fact we’re proud to have these high standards.

I’m also excited by our DE&I journey and some of the commitments we’ve made already, in particular our commitment to have 30% women in our management population by 2030.?

Diversity brings many benefits to a business, such as different perspectives and lived experiences, which feeds into our working culture, and even into a greater understanding of our customers, so heading up one of the teams responsible for driving these initiatives is meaningful for all of us, especially as my TA team is all female.

There are lots of positive things to talk about at this time.?We’re a company in transition, turning ourselves around after a few challenging years, but there are lots of positive indicators, which make it an exciting time for anyone wanting to join us now and be a part of our journey.

I look back on my last year as a year of transition as well for me and my team, making significant hires into the company, improving the candidate experience and finding the best global automotive talent to join Aston Martin.?

We still have a lot of improvements to make, but it’s been a great first year.

For anyone looking at us as a potential employer, all of our vacancies are advertised on or careers’ page and on LinkedIn, and job alerts can be set up on both platforms.?

We are in a significant growth phase at Aston Martin, so it’s never been a better time to think about working for us.