<h3 class="display">Our social and environmental impact</h3><p class="body-l">We’re aware that what we do has implications for a range of stakeholders and, as responsible members of a wider community.</p>

<h3 class="display">Meet our team</h3><p class="body-l">Meet and connect with the people who make Gerrell &amp; Hard the business it is, and learn more about their specialist areas.</p>

Our History

<h2>Mission statement</h2>

<p class="body-l">Founded in 2011, Gerrell &amp; Hard is a recruitment and workforce expansion business that has become a scaleup partner to startups, market disruptors, innovators and established brands in the Technology, Engineering and Manufacturing space.&nbsp;</p><p>We are respected across Europe and beyond for outstanding leadership, expertise and results in a constantly-changing world.</p>

About <span>Gerrell &amp; Hard</span>

<h1 class="h2 display">Industry <span>insights</span></h1>

<p class="body-l">Thought-provoking articles on talent within the world of high technology.</p>

<p class="body-l">To understand your needs as a candidate we go beyond (admittedly important) considerations such as salary requirements and preferred location, to understand more about what you want to get out of your career and the values and mission you seek in an employer.</p><p class="body-l">What problems are you motivated to solve? How do you want to work? What is your motive for wanting a new challenge?</p><p class="body-l">In this way we aim to deliver true richness to our candidates and ensure we present our clients with inspired and committed people.</p>

A new level of insight

<h3 class="display">Sectors and skills</h3><p>We recruit for most technology design and manufacture roles today, from the people building innovative solutions to society’s biggest challenges, to applications that cross traditional market boundaries. Our clients include disruptive startups, established brands reimagining their product, and legacy markets.</p><p>We recruit anybody from design engineers in automotive or autonomous mobility to data specialists in manufacturing. Many of our candidates are chosen because their skills and qualities are needed to produce technologies that are in the throes of being born right now.</p>

<h4 class="display">We’re often with a candidate for their <span>entire journey</span> from entry level to leader.</h4>

<p class="bigger">Gerrell &amp; Hard’s approach to your experience as a candidate is to build a mutually beneficial, lasting relationship founded on trust and a deep understanding of what motivates and drives you.</p><p>We’ve had the pleasure, many times over, of being part of a candidate’s journey—from helping them secure their first role to having them engage us to help them build their new team. It’s one of the most rewarding experiences for a recruitment company and the clearest example we can provide of how we operate as a recruitment partner.</p>

<h3 class="display">Services</h3><p class="body-l">Our services are about one thing: ensuring you have an outstanding and enjoyable candidate experience.</p>

If it’s in tech, we’ve got it covered.

<h1 class="display"><span>Career</span> advancement</h1>

<h1 class="h2 display">Success <span>stories</span></h1>

<p class="body-l">Our growing roster of case studies provides an insight into the range of services we provide, and the names we’re proud to support.</p>

<h2>Message us</h2>

<h1 class="h2 display">Contact <span>G&amp;H</span></h1>

<p class="body-l">We’d love to hear from you. Please use the form below or the contact details provided to get in touch with us. One of our consultants will respond as soon as possible.</p>

Since 2020 we have seized the opportunity to encourage home/flexible working, giving our team more time for their lives and downsizing our offices to a sustainable office space at Pure in Port Solent whose commitment to Net Zero we admire. Pure runs on 100% renewable energy, recycles 70-80% of its waste and offers sustainable commuting.

As a carbon reduction initiative we subscribe to eForest Tree Planting, which means that for every candidate we place, a tree is planted in a community woodlands, nature reserve or community farm. eForest works hard to ensure that the trees are planted and maintained properly so that they live to maturity. Our tree planting count is below!

Our charity work reflects the interests of our employees and we’re happy to support any cause that matters to the team. We have supported charities including Naomi House and Jack’s place, participating in runs, cycles, walks, bake days and more.

Sustainable culture

Tree planting

Charity

Trees planted to date by Gerrell &amp; Hard

<p>This is a 404 error, which means you've clicked on a bad link or entered an invalid URL.</p>

<p class="body-l">Join the startups, scaleups &amp; established OEMs we’ve helped to plan and execute their workforce and hiring strategies.</p><p><b>Let’s talk.</b></p>

<h3 class="display">Success stories</h3><p class="bigger">Our expertise in onboarding, assessment centres, employer branding, attraction strategy and candidate insight has enabled many tech disruptors and challenger brands to accelerate their growth.&nbsp;</p>

Become a partner

<h4 class="display">Proud to be a growth partner to some of today’s <span>most exciting</span> tech brands.</h4>

<p class="bigger">Gerrell &amp; Hard has emerged as a leading growth partner for many of today’s most innovative challenger brands and technology disruptors, helping to take companies from startup to scaleup.</p><p>We support new brands from the outset to help them avoid the pitfalls of hiring their first generation of talent, and consult with established&nbsp;market-leaders as they diversify and modernise their technologies and products.</p><p>For emerging technology firms, the need to focus on refining and developing product and attracting investors means that planning workforce expansion and mapping talent against the skills they need to achieve their goals can be left until late in the day. This is further complicated because in today’s evolving technology markets there is no standardised blueprint for the hiring process. Even established OEMs find themselves navigating uncharted territories as they pivot into new tech.&nbsp;</p><p>Our consultation, planning and execution of workforce and hiring strategy goes far beyond recruiting new staff. We can integrate seamlessly into any phase of a client project, either spearheading the initiative or supplementing an in-house team.</p>

<h3 class="display">Services</h3><p>As growth partners, we view our role as resolving workforce challenges so that our partners can concentrate on their job of solving the big technological challenges and creating solutions&nbsp; for a better future.</p>

<h3 class="display">Services</h3><p class="body-l">As growth partners, we view our role as resolving workforce challenges so that our partners can concentrate on their job of solving the big technological challenges and creating solutions&nbsp; for a better future.</p>

Your trusted growth partner in tech recruitment

<h1 class="display"><span>Growth</span> partnership</h1>

<h3 class="display">Recruiting for a <span>positive</span> future.</h3><p>It’s important to the Gerrell &amp; Hard team that we can be proud of our social impact and environmental footprint.</p>

<h2 class="display">We're with you for the <span>journey.</span></h2>

Gerrell &amp; Hard has proven credentials as a growth partner for organisations at the forefront of technology. From facilitating disruptive startups and scale-ups to helping established OEMs pivot into new applications, our expertise allows us to identify and onboard the skillsets the sector needs in order to address society’s challenges.

All innovation shares a common denominator: talent. We source talented people for the full spectrum of high tech and engineering roles from design and development in emerging technologies to manufacture in heavy industry. We play a part in the migration of transferrable skillsets between sectors and also hire within vertical markets.

From design engineers in aerospace to data specialists in manufacture, we cover the gamut of technology, technical design, engineering and manufacture roles. In a world where market boundaries are blurring, we can find candidates the role they know they want, or uncover new career possibilities in new markets.

Growth partnership

Talent sourcing

Career advancement

<h3 class="display">Applying to HVS</h3><p class="bigger">Please apply to live vacancies (below or from the job search) or by sending us your updated CV.</p>

<h3 class="display">Applying to Volta Trucks</h3><p class="bigger">Please apply to live vacancies (below or from the job search) or by sending us your updated CV.</p>

<h1 class="h2 display">Partners</h1>

<p class="body-l">We’re honoured to act as recruitment partners to some of the most exciting technology and innovation brands in the world. In this capacity we play a significant role in identifying and hiring niche skills, workforce management and growth planning.</p>

<h3 class="mb-3">Terms and conditions</h3><ul class="w-75"><li class="body-s">Contractors must complete 13 consecutive weeks of service and permanent staff must have been in their role for 13 weeks, to the satisfaction of the client. </li><li class="body-s">The candidate you refer must either: not be registered with Gerrell &amp; Hard OR if they are already registered, have not been in contact with us in any way within the last 12 months. </li><li class="body-s">Reward claims must be made within 30 days of the start of the placement.</li><li class="body-s">Rewards will be paid once the referred candidate completes the abovementioned qualifying period. </li><li class="body-s">Gerrell &amp; Hard reserves the right to modify or terminate the Terms and Conditions of the referral scheme without notice.</li><li class="body-s">In the event of any dispute, Gerrell &amp; Hard’s decision will be final. </li></ul>

<p class="body-l ">Could you help someone to find the job that changes their life? We created our referral programme as a way of thanking people for helping their friends, family or colleagues to find their next great job by introducing them to the team here at Gerrell &amp; Hard.</p><p class="mb-4">To qualify, simply recommend a candidate to us (meeting our fairly painless terms and conditions below) and if this results in a successful placement, we’ll send you a giftcard as a thank you!</p><h3 class="mb-3">Our reward prize</h3><p class="mb-4">For a successful placement, we award £250 of Amazon vouchers.</p>

<h1 class="display mb-4" style="line-height:0.85"><small style="font-size: 0.75em">Refer a</small> <span>friend</span></h1>

<h2 class="xs-h4">Refer a friend</h2>

<p class="body-l">If you’d like us to consider you for current and future opportunities, please upload your CV so we can get started working with you.</p>

<h3 class="display">Upload <span>your CV</span></h3>

<h2 class="xs-h4">Register with G&amp;H</h2>

<h3 class="display">A full attraction strategy to launch or build a team.</h3><p>Learn more about how Gerrell &amp; Hard can act as a growth partner to tech brands and how we can help accelerate your growth through recruitment and workforce strategy.</p>

<h4 class="display">We never let anything get in the way of <span>great</span>  customer service.</h4>

<p class="body-l">Our recruitment service begins with full lifecycle contingency hiring for a one-off requirement. It can extend to an assignment to build a talented project team, or even to us becoming your long-term workforce strategy partner. </p><p>However and whatever you need us for, we’re structured to provide outstanding service and delivery first and foremost, and we ensure nothing gets in the way of that. Our team of passionate industry experts is motivated purely by customer and candidate success.</p>

<h3 class="display">Services</h3><p class="body-l">In addition to contingency recruitment, our services include:</p>

A service structured around successful delivery.

<h1 class="display"><span>Talent</span> sourcing</h1>

<p class="body-l">Gerrell &amp; Hard has good form when it comes to filling the vacancies that others can’t. Challenge us with your latest or hard-to-fill vacancy.</p>

<h3 class="display">What's your hiring <span>challenge?</span></h3>

<h3>Register a vacancy</h3>

<p class="body-l">Our outstanding recruiters enjoy doing their jobs with autonomy and freedom. We intentionally keep our team small but perfectly-formed, which gives us the responsiveness we need to provide a service we can be proud of. We rarely seek new employees, but if you think you can offer something exceptional, you’re welcome to <b>get in touch</b>.</p>

Want to join our team?

<h1 class="h2 display">Meet our <span>team</span></h1>

<p class="body-l">Meet and connect with the people who make Gerrell &amp; Hard the business it is, and learn more about their specialist areas.</p>

<h1 class="h2 display">TechTalent</h1>

<p class="body-l">Insights and opinions from the frontline of tech recruitment, from Gerrell & Hard</p>

<h2 class="display">We're with you for the <span>journey</span>.</h2>

<p><strong>Sophia's now at Red Bull Racing, but there&rsquo;s more to her story than the exciting companies she has worked for. Her journey to becoming settled in the UK is instructive to say the least, so for our latest blog, we&rsquo;ve asked her to share it. </strong></p>
<p>Over to you, Sophia!&nbsp;</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m a New Yorker who recently obtained my Indefinite Leave To Remain in the UK&mdash;also referred to as ILR or Settlement&mdash;after living and working here for ten years. Along the way I&rsquo;ve had to navigate four different VISAs and spent over &pound;15,000. This is an account of the process I went through, and how that experience informs my thinking when I hire in-demand STEM candidates in my current role at Red Bull Racing.</p>
<p>I grew up on Long Island and from the start had a passion for cars and motorsport that I shared with my dad, who in turn got his passion from his grandad. He was a catalyst in my early interest in cars and that bond shaped me. My dad didn&rsquo;t have a son&mdash;I was one of two girls&mdash;so he was happy that I shared his interests.</p>
<p>As a kid I had no idea that you could go to school to work in F1, and when I was looking at universities, motorsport wasn&rsquo;t as big in the States as it is now. So when it was time for me to start thinking about my future, my family and I started researching universities and what you had to do to get in. It occurred to me that maybe I could enter that world after all. We visited a lot of UK universities and settled on Oxford Brookes, where I studied Motorsport Engineering as a BSc. That&rsquo;s where my visa journey began: I had to get a student visa, and thankfully my parents were able to pay the fees.</p>
<h3>Early days in the UK</h3>
<p>Coming from the US, I didn&rsquo;t realise what a big deal it was to live somewhere else. My time at Oxford predated the graduate visa scheme (where international students can stay in the UK for two years to look for work after graduating). I did a placement at Mercedes HPP for a year, which was my introduction to F1, and then completed my final year at university. That last year was one of the hardest of my life: I had no job lined up, no prospects, just a looming sense of imminent unemployment. Who wants to hire someone who, after graduating, would need a visa, when there are fresh UK graduates?</p>
<p>I&rsquo;d also met my now-husband. The thought of leaving the life I&rsquo;d built over four years of studying and working was gutting. I&rsquo;d invested so much and felt like I had nowhere to go. If I went back to the US, &nbsp;getting back into the UK would be harder, more dependent on sponsorship, family, a partner...it was a really tough time. I had two choices: go home and accept defeat, or find a way to stay.</p>
<p>I decided to continue studying so that I could remain in the UK as a student. I got a place at Cranfield University on an MSc course in Motorsport Engineering. It&rsquo;s a prestigious, highly regarded institution and course. I made it halfway through and realised I didn&rsquo;t want to do more school; I wanted to work and build my career.</p>
<h3>Enter: partner visas</h3>
<p>Luckily, I&rsquo;d been living with my partner for two years, which meant I could apply for a partner visa instead of relying on student status. He was working and had done the same course I did, so he encouraged me to stop putting things off and apply for a partner visa.</p>
<p>The graduate visa scheme I&rsquo;ve described wasn&rsquo;t an option then&mdash;it came in two years after I finished my bachelor&rsquo;s. For both my bachelor&rsquo;s and master&rsquo;s, the process was the same: secure a university place and pay a health surcharge along with visa admin fees and university fees, and prove you can support yourself. It was pretty standard.</p>
<p>I applied for my partner visa halfway through my MSc. One of us was earning nothing and the other had a graduate salary, which for engineers isn&rsquo;t amazing. It was a huge expense, but thankfully, I was granted the visa. That started our five-year partner visa journey towards ILR, which is the most expensive thing my husband and I have ever done.</p>
<h3>Starting work</h3>
<p>In 2020 I got a job at SST Technology, making bespoke exhaust systems for motorsport and automotive applications. I loved it, and was employed there during COVID. In hindsight, I&rsquo;m glad I stayed in the UK. I&rsquo;m not sure when or if I would have come back otherwise.<br>I was at SST Tech for nearly a year, and then Gerrell &amp; Hard found me an opportunity at Polestar. I worked there for just over four years, joining as a junior engineer and eventually working in the thermal systems department. It was such a refreshing place to be, especially for a woman in engineering: I felt completely accepted, the people were fantastic and the work was exciting. I grew a lot as a professional in a traditionally male-dominated industry, in a culture where that didn&rsquo;t seem to matter at all.</p>
<h3>The challenging process of settlement (ILR)</h3>
<p>As my career developed, it got easier to afford the visas I needed to stay in the UK. My partner visa lasted for two-and-a-half years, so I renewed it before getting married in 2022. To apply for ILR, you have to be on a partner visa for five years continuously. It&rsquo;s not cheap.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve lived and worked in the STEM industry in the UK for ten years now. In that time I&rsquo;ve never had a say in anything, and there have been some challenges getting here. The previous government raised visa fees massively, and the salary threshold for self-sufficiency jumped from around &pound;18,000 to nearly &pound;35,000 almost overnight.</p>
<p>My husband and I both work full-time now, but if we were starting out today on a graduate salary, we wouldn&rsquo;t have a chance. My final partner visa renewal (before ILR) was due to cost around &pound;1,600, but jumped to nearly &pound;3,000 by the time I applied. Naturalisation used to cost about &pound;800. It&rsquo;s now double that.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve been through multiple visa applications and each one is an invasive process. For the partner visa, you have to prove your relationship: photos with each other&rsquo;s families, joint bank statements, records of holidays, biometrics. You get used to being treated as if you&rsquo;re trying to con somebody and learn to keep records, statements and documents for absolutely everything, because you&rsquo;ll need to prove it all again. You live life differently. You plan for visa renewals. Big expenses like houses and weddings get balanced with saving for applications. Somewhere in the middle of this process, my partner and I got married, and I started a new job right before applying for ILR. Over ten years, we&rsquo;ve spent about &pound;15,000 on visas alone, and more on expenses peripheral to the process, like travel. It was exhausting, but we got &nbsp;used to it. I finally got my ILR earlier this year, and as I posted on LinkedIn, it was one of the best days of my life!</p>
<p><img style="float: right; padding-left: 30px; padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 20px;" src="https://cdn.sourceflow.co.uk/rw87bmmqnxg4ia5zgo2ak03hbv1v" alt="" width="400" height="472"></p>
<h3>The value of international candidates in STEM</h3>
<p>In a country that is crying out for STEM graduates and expertise, I think we can do more to help people who want to work and provide valuable skills to the UK. When I applied for jobs after university, I got called for interviews, and then dropped as soon as people learned I wasn&rsquo;t British&mdash;despite stating openly on job applications that I&rsquo;d need sponsorship. I&rsquo;d get calls, then get rejected as soon as recruiters or HR considered the implications. One individual even hung up on me when I reminded them I&rsquo;d need a visa.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s not just government bureaucracy. Many employers still don&rsquo;t want to sponsor applicants. It feels to me that government, employers and further education could do more to work together to bridge the gap that so many international students fall through. UK universities pride themselves on their diversity and intake of international students, especially in STEM. They bring students in, but don&rsquo;t always offer a path forward. I know doctors who have trained here and faced the same struggle. I spent four years building towards a career in F1 and was repeatedly turned away for something that was out of my control.</p>
<p>Now there&rsquo;s a graduate visa scheme, which helps. But back then, the thought of having no prospects here loomed over me and ruined my final year at university. I was unhappy and aimless, when all I wanted to do was apply my skills for the UK economy. &nbsp;</p>
<h3>Using what I&rsquo;ve learned</h3>
<p>Happily, I&rsquo;m now in a position where I&rsquo;m able to use my experience for the betterment of others. I&rsquo;m well-versed in bureaucracy and practically an expert in visas (as I recently said to a colleague in our visa team!) Being in R&amp;D, I get to work on recruitment from a technical angle, advising talent acquisition teams and bridging the gap between engineering and HR.</p>
<p>I came to the UK to work in F1, and now I get to help others aspire to do the same, while still doing it myself. I&rsquo;ve come full circle and it means I see things differently now. When someone from outside the UK applies for a role, I look at their CV a little longer. I think harder: could they be a fit? Could we make it work? I remember how desperate I was for a foot in the door.</p>
<p>My current employer, Red Bull, is great at sponsoring people and nurturing them. The R&amp;D department recognises the importance of this, the value of the STEM sector to the UK and how important sponsorship is to help graduates onboard. That applies for any graduate, from anywhere.</p>
<h3>Can STEM employers lead the way? &nbsp;</h3>
<p>But generally, employers could do better. Recruitment is getting so demanding that you see things like hiring teams saying roles are junior, then asking for two years of experience. That&rsquo;s not junior, and it broadcasts that you&rsquo;re not willing to invest.</p>
<p>As an industry, F1 often does things a little better. It&rsquo;s niche and it can be a little bit about who you know, but it offers placements that really help. Candidates are able to get a foot in the door, and those who do often come back after graduation, as my husband did.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, I&rsquo;m passionate about student placements. In the US, we don&rsquo;t have the same systems for this as I see with some employers in the UK. It&rsquo;s obvious to those on the inside that employers benefit from offering placements: they&rsquo;ve investing in someone and it gives them a known candidate for future roles. Even if a candidate stays in post for only a year, it&rsquo;s valuable. We need to make it easier for people to get that first job, to be moulded into the professionals employers want, which starts with early engagement and training.</p>
<p>As I write this I&rsquo;m still under thirty, but everything I&rsquo;ve experienced over the last decade has shaped my passion for what I do now, and strengthened my resolve to facilitate employers and candidates helping one another.</p>
<p>You don&rsquo;t find many foreign candidates who get through the entire visa process to get a job in the UK, and I&rsquo;m grateful to Nick Gerrell and to Polestar for supporting me at the time. I also feel very lucky to be at Red Bull, whose attitude to student placements and onboarding is admirable&mdash;they&rsquo;re exceptionally good at this, and it says a lot about the team&rsquo;s attitude to acquiring and developing talent.</p>
<p>Next up: my British passport!&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>Thanks Sophia for sharing your amazing, challenging journey and for your inspiring take on it! There are a lot of lessons here for employers in the critically-important STEM sector, and elsewhere.</em></p>

Ten years and £15,000: an American engineer’s journey to settling in the UK

<p><strong>Clearly well-placed to understand what it takes to succeed across a broad spectrum of industries, Paul&rsquo;s career has been marked by a willingness to embrace new challenges and adapt his engineering expertise to different sectors. Along the way, he&rsquo;s gained a deep understanding of project management, leadership and the high-end luxury market. From the very outset, he&rsquo;s stayed with composites; it&rsquo;s a rare thing for an engineer to sustain their specialism for so long in one sense, while crossing vertical boundaries in another. &nbsp;</strong></p>
<p>We&rsquo;ve asked Paul to share his career story with us, as well as some insights into his success and his markets. Thanks to Paul for sharing his experience. Over to you, Paul!&nbsp;</p>
<h3>Early career and engineering foundations</h3>
<p>I&rsquo;m an engineer by background; I studied a BEng Hons in composite engineering at Plymouth Polytechnic, which was a university by the time I graduated in 1991. I specialised in carbon fibre and GRP, starting out in mechanical engineering and later finding my way into materials. I had a feeling then that composite materials had a great future.</p>
<p>I wasn&rsquo;t especially academic. I did a BTEC, not A-levels, but once I found engineering, something clicked for me. My sandwich year&mdash;doing finite element analysis at SAC Tech (later Ricardo) in Bristol&mdash;was a turning point. Before that, I was a typical student. Afterwards, I was a grown up, hungry for work. That year gave me a sense of how professional environments work and changed how I approached my final year.</p>
<p>After graduation, I didn&rsquo;t land a job straight away. It took six months before I joined GEC Marconi Materials Technology&mdash;a big company at the time, now absorbed into what became British Aerospace. I worked on radar-absorbing and radar-transparent materials for defence, all centred around composites. But my biggest takeaway from that time was learning the art of project engineering and project management: working with customers, managing time, delivering to strict project specifications and deadlines.</p>
<p>Project management became a constant theme in my career, and I&rsquo;ve always been focused on delivery. I remember doing a time management course early on, and I&rsquo;ve maintained the habit of keeping a logbook, prioritising tasks and using a proper to-do list ever since. I still love ticking things off a to-do list!</p>
<h3>Exciting times at McLaren</h3>
<p>After six years at Marconi, which included a promotion to Deputy Engineering Manager, I was approached by McLaren Composites. I wasn&rsquo;t actively looking, but my CV was out in the world. The team was interested in me because I had hands-on experience with composite manufacturing methods. I joined as a Project Engineer just as Ron Dennis signed a deal with Mercedes-Benz for the McLaren-Mercedes SLR&mdash;a new GT sports car that would combine supercar performance with mass-production techniques.</p>
<p>I developed the carbon fibre chassis and body, built a team of ten and led the full system development. If there was a problem, I&rsquo;d put my hand up and say, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll give it a go.&rdquo; That mindset got me noticed, and once the car went into production I was offered the role of Programme Director.</p>
<p>Working with both the Mercedes and McLaren boards brought its challenges. It was a fast-paced motorsport mindset meeting a big corporate OEM structure&mdash;two radically different cultures&mdash;and that made for some interesting times!</p>
<p>When the SLR went into production, my focus shifted to building trust, improving quality, reducing costs and managing that cultural divide. In the end, it worked. Mercedes signed off on the full production run, including the coup&eacute; and roadster. I led development of the sports edition and lived and breathed the SLR for ten years, from 1999 to 2009.</p>
<p>That was a transitional moment for McLaren. The partnership with Mercedes was coming to an end: they were moving forward with AMG, while McLaren was shifting focus to its own range of lightweight sports cars. Most people from the SLR team moved on but I stayed, with around 50 of us seeing the programme through to the end.</p>
<h3>Creating opportunities with McLaren</h3>
<p>As that chapter closed, I wasn&rsquo;t sure what to do next, and thought about leaving. I had a chat with my boss, who came back with a proposal: to set up a bespoke business within McLaren to serve customers who wanted to personalise their cars&mdash;think Mulliner at Bentley or Q by Aston Martin.</p>
<p>So I set up McLaren Operations&mdash;which became MSO, McLaren Special Operations&mdash;with the same team that had just wrapped up the SLR. The team were asking, &ldquo;What do we do next?&rdquo;. And this was it. It was brilliant, we all loved it.</p>
<p>Through that work, and the McLaren&ndash;Mercedes relationship, I found myself drawn deeper into the world of luxury and high-net-worth individuals. I started going to events, representing McLaren in the press and seeing first-hand how luxury isn&rsquo;t just about the product&mdash;it&rsquo;s about the entire experience.</p>
<h3>Enter the P1: launching an iconic hypercar</h3>
<p>At this time, McLaren wanted to build a new hypercar, but the main engineering team was focused on launching the core range, so I was asked to get things moving. I completed the spec book for the P1, set the vision and once again found myself continuing through the programme, eventually becoming Programme Director.</p>
<p>The P1 went on to become one of the most iconic cars of its era. Alongside the Porsche 918 and Ferrari LaFerrari, it formed Top Gear&rsquo;s so-called &ldquo;Holy Trinity&rdquo; of hybrid hypercars. It was a commercial success, too, which led to the P1 GTR programme: a track-only version supported by a global driver development programme. I was Team Principal, and we travelled with the owners to tracks around the world: Barcelona, Texas, Silverstone, Paul Ricard in Marseille. It was an incredibly exciting time.</p>
<p>That programme gave me a real insight into luxury lifestyles. Our clients came from all over: finance, food and beyond. They were Canadians, Americans, Mexicans, Swedes; a really diverse clientele. It became a networking event as much as a driving experience.</p>
<h3>From supercars to luxury yachts</h3>
<p>Fun as it was, that was the final chapter of my time at McLaren. I&rsquo;d been there for seventeen years. I&rsquo;d sat on the board and I was comfortable, but I needed something new. Fortuitously, my old boss Anthony Sheriff, now at Princess Yachts, reached out. He was leading a strategic turnaround with the brand and asked if I&rsquo;d join as Chief Technical Officer, with a focus on refreshing the product portfolio.</p>
<p>So my family moved from Surrey to Devon. It was a big lifestyle change that, along with the career change, made for a great and positive time. Shifting from automotive to marine was a big transition, but working with a boss I trusted made it a lot easier.</p>
<p>When it comes to the process of product development, there&rsquo;s a lot of synergy between marine and automotive. The processes are surprisingly similar and while you can&rsquo;t transfer everything directly, there&rsquo;s good practice that applies across both sectors. So I reworked some processes from my time in automotive to fit the marine sector. It was a different industry with different volumes and dynamics but the fundamentals were familiar.</p>
<h3>Skills you can take anyway</h3>
<p>At McLaren I was both a Project Manager and the operational lead for MSO, and one thing I learned is that project management is all about people. Whether you're dealing with the shop floor, a CEO, a board or high-net-worth clients, it&rsquo;s about reading the room and adapting.</p>
<p>I don&rsquo;t consider myself intellectually gifted, but I do have strong emotional intelligence. I&rsquo;ve always believed in treating people the way I&rsquo;d want to be treated. That principle has carried me through when transitioning between sectors.</p>
<p>Being Programme Director is like being the conductor of an orchestra&mdash;you&rsquo;re not playing the instruments, but you&rsquo;re helping everyone else play in tune. At McLaren, I worked with brilliant people: aerodynamicists, designers, crash engineers&mdash;and it was my job to bring them together and deliver. At Princess, it was more about working with craftspeople&mdash;not as many PhDs, but decades of hands-on experience and skill. I think we all did a great job at Princess of refreshing and refocusing the range.</p>
<p>Just before the pandemic, our COO was taken ill; he passed away with COVID complications. He was young and it was a very sad time for everyone. I took on responsibility for operations, which was a big step for me. I led the operations team through COVID and was formally made COO, spending three-and-a-half years in the role until we brought in a more operations-focused leader and I returned to product strategy and technical leadership.</p>
<h3>Changing times</h3>
<p>Sustainability is the big challenge facing the marine sector now. Boats are powered by 2,000-horsepower diesel engines. If that&rsquo;s fine today, it won&rsquo;t be in the future, so the industry has to change and indeed there&rsquo;s a lot happening. I saw the beginnings of that, and then came another shift when the business was sold to a US-based private equity firm. The CEO was asked to leave, and I followed shortly after. Suddenly, I found myself on gardening leave for six months&mdash;being paid to do nothing. It was surreal. I decorated the house, went to New Zealand to see friends, and just took time out.</p>
<p>After 30 years of 60-hour weeks, I was amazed by how quickly I could switch off. People advised me not to rush and they were right. I turned to LinkedIn, a platform I&rsquo;d used only passively before, and began posting, reflecting and reconnecting. I went through my contacts, identified around 80 people I wanted to speak with, and 50 responded. It was incredibly rewarding.</p>
<p>Everyone I spoke to said the same thing: I had thirty years of product development experience, so why not consult for a while? So I did. I set up my own consultancy, which I ran until Amalgam approached me.</p>
<p>At first, I wasn&rsquo;t sure Amalgam was the right fit, but I soon recognised that it ticked all the boxes: a team of about 400 globally, a flat structure and incredible attention to detail. We&rsquo;re trusted by some of the world&rsquo;s biggest automotive brands to build luxury scale replicas, manufacturing in China, Hungary and the UK. When I was offered the CEO role I questioned whether I have the right skillset, which is natural when you switch to a new market. But three months in, I&rsquo;m loving it. Everything I&rsquo;ve learned transfers beautifully.</p>
<p><img style="float: right; padding-left: 30px; padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 20px;" src="https://cdn.sourceflow.co.uk/okvrk3eoqdiggbwt4xc9c8n1oonn" alt="" width="400" height="534"></p>
<h3>The luxury market: what is it?</h3>
<p>The concept of luxury as a sector in its own right is an interesting one. Luxury isn&rsquo;t just about product&mdash;it&rsquo;s also how you deliver it. It&rsquo;s branding, experience and perception. At McLaren, the engineers weren&rsquo;t thinking about luxury <em>per se</em>, they were thinking, &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s build the best car in the world.&rdquo; That&rsquo;s what mattered. You give people the environment to do their best work and the result will speak for itself.</p>
<p>The price point is part of what defines luxury, but so is the quality you deliver across all customer touchpoints, and connection is everything. Both the finished product and your aftercare and customer support must be first rate, because nobody expects a sloppy relationship with a luxury brand. Whether it&rsquo;s models, boats or cars, the key is the relationship you build with the client.</p>
<p>And while people <em>can </em>move between sectors, it's not always easy. Different industries operate at different paces; the automotive sector in particular can be fast and very intense.</p>
<h3>Reflections on my career</h3>
<p>Gerrell &amp; Hard have asked me to reflect on what I think has made my career tick, and all I can do is talk about what&rsquo;s worked for me. I think education matters, but I wouldn&rsquo;t describe myself as an intellectual. There are really two things that I am very clear about having worked for me. One is grabbing any opportunity that presents itself. Being in the right place at the right time helps, but you still have to grab that opportunity and make it work.</p>
<p>The second and probably the biggest factor for me is emotional intelligence. As I&rsquo;ve said, I&rsquo;ve always believed in treating people how I&rsquo;d want to be treated, whether they&rsquo;re the CEO or the most junior person in the building. If I&rsquo;m going to be late for a meeting, I always send a message. It's just basic respect that costs nothing. During my recent time away from the industry, many of the people I spoke to were those I&rsquo;d supported earlier in their career, and they were happy to return the favour and have a chat. How you treat people really matters. You never know who you&rsquo;ll need to speak to or rely on later in life.</p>
<p>Outside of the workplace, though, I&rsquo;ve also benefited from an incredibly supportive family who have allowed me to work long hours and move for work when needed. That has been hugely important for me and I&rsquo;m very, very lucky.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Thanks very much to Paul for sharing his amazing career story, which is as inspiring as it is instructive!&nbsp;</strong></p>

Paul Mackenzie: a journey through composites engineering, luxury and leadership

<h5>​This story begins when Gerrell &amp; Hard took the decision to fully embrace (optional) remote working after the pandemic, and ends with a fantastic adventure that my family and I would love to repeat&mdash;and very likely will one day!</h5>
<p>I met my wife Ellen while we were travelling and she gave up a lot to leave Sweden and live with me in England before we were married. When she became pregnant with our second child, my new remote working arrangements presented us with an opportunity to have an adventure while seeing her family. We began to plan a trip in which I would combine travel with work. The idea of travelling and working, with the freedom that brings, appealed to us both.</p>
<h3>The planning</h3>
<p>From the outset I should say that it was hard to get it right, and it wasn&rsquo;t glamorous. It took a lot of planning and organising to make it work; Ellen and I are both highly-organised and we were totally aligned: in our vision for the trip, in our motivation, and in how seriously we took it as a project.</p>
<p>With two young kids (one a toddler, one only a few months old) we knew we&rsquo;d need the freedom to take things at our own pace. We had no illusions about the discipline it would require to travel and work. We decided to buy a camper van and turn it into a living-and-sleeping space, family transport...and my office.</p>
<p>That way we could drive through Europe to Ellen&rsquo;s family in Sweden, I could use some holiday for our travels, and work from the van once we were there. We planned for a six-week trip, with me working for half of that.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.sourceflow.co.uk/k6jk7z115ljzpghbt8416gk4mxaf" alt="6 weeks" width="800" height="450"></p>
<h3>The trip</h3>
<p>We wanted to be free to go at our pace, stopping and spending more time in a place if we liked it, or if the kids needed some down time. The real excitement began when we drove through the Channel tunnel to France, then on to Belgium, where we stayed in Bruges. From there we drove to the Netherlands (stunning) and then to Germany, where we spent some time in Hamburg. Then it was onwards to Denmark, where I found myself gawping at the engineering of the country&rsquo;s famous bridges, especially the Great Belt.</p>
<p>From there we drove northwards through Sweden to Ellen&rsquo;s family in North Gothenburg. Apart from Sweden, we spent the most time in Belgium, Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands. We took nine days to drive to Gothenburg, spent three weeks with Ellen&rsquo;s family, and had a more leisurely twelve-day return journey.</p>
<h3>Turning the van into an office</h3>
<p>For the duration of those six weeks, our van was everything. While travelling, we ate in it, slept in it, and it was our shelter if the weather was bad. For the three weeks in Gothenburg, my van-as-office was parked on the drive of Ellen&rsquo;s mum, Christina and I could use her Wi-Fi. But I didn&rsquo;t want to be too presumptuous about this, so I&rsquo;d already arranged a bolt-on work package to my network carrier to ensure I could &ldquo;hotspot&rdquo; and stream data anywhere if I needed to.</p>
<p>To make the van work-ready I bought a little stowable table that flipped up to provide just enough room for my laptop, keyboard and phone. I was really happy with the ergonomics and comfort of my set-up, and had a small kitchen and coffee machine to hand &ndash; almost literally. I&rsquo;m a coffee-lover and those coffees were vitally important to me.</p>
<p>It was a clean, clutter-free and efficient set-up and I loved the minimalism. For those three weeks I really didn&rsquo;t miss my home office and often forgot that I was working in a van. I worked as hard as ever, made plenty of calls and nobody knew that I was working (very) remotely unless I told them!</p>
<p>When you&rsquo;re working like this, you really appreciate the convenience of contemporary technology. I&rsquo;m sure there are plenty of digital nomads who will relate to the freedom that Apple Air Pods gave me (no, this blog is not sponsored!). They were a game-changer for calls, Zooms and the like. And with Sweden being only an hour ahead of UK time, there was little-to-no disruption at all to my working day. In fact, lacking the interruptions that working from home typically foists upon home-workers, I enjoyed some of the most focused work-time I can remember.</p>
<p>We were very fortunate that my parents kindly agreed to look after our dog for six weeks. The cat you&rsquo;ll see in one photo didn&rsquo;t come with us. He&rsquo;s called H&aring;kan, belongs to Christina and was a frequent and welcome visitor to my four-wheeled office! My parents&rsquo; kindness, and the kindness of Ellen&rsquo;s whole family&mdash;not to mention the trust Gerrell &amp; Hard has in its staff&mdash;were what really allowed us to have this experience.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.sourceflow.co.uk/nfq8kx3n7h1a4vksqfa61jfsytfn" alt="6 weeks " width="800" height="450"></p>
<h3>Would it work for everyone?</h3>
<p>Our trip, and my digital nomadism, was a fantastic experience. That being said, I don&rsquo;t know that it would suit everyone. It took a lot of planning. Ellen and I both love organising things and we&rsquo;re a good team. We don&rsquo;t need much and we were happy to adopt a &ldquo;quality over quantity&rdquo; lifestyle for our travels, which meant a lot of focusing on what we really needed and an understanding of what we couldn&rsquo;t live without. We had to make sure we had the means to entertain and (of course) look after two young children, in a van, for three weeks of travel. For all of that time, things were pretty intense: we were constantly active, whether making food or driving and navigating and looking after the children, as well as trying to take in the sights. While living and travelling in the van, we barely went to the shops &ndash; we&rsquo;d planned to carry nearly all the food we would need.</p>
<p>What surprised me a little was that at no point did either of us feel we&rsquo;d had enough: we could happily have stayed at each of our stopping-points for longer, done more, seen more, explored more. We could happily have extended the trip. It was gratifying to come home feeling that we&rsquo;d done the right thing, and were hungry for more.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.sourceflow.co.uk/l926r2gxwbkgdfwrncf7j4gqnesf" alt="fire" width="800" height="450"></p>
<h3>At-a-glance takeaways</h3>
<p>Our trip worked because we were a good team, closely-aligned, respectful of one another&rsquo;s ambitions and needs for the trip.</p>
<p>It was important that we got the ergonomics right of a small space that would become both a home and workspace for six weeks.</p>
<p>Though fun and a fantastic way to make memories I will cherish forever, our trip wasn&rsquo;t glamorous. We had to pare our lives down to the bare minimum required. We enjoyed that, but some might not.</p>

Six weeks as a digital nomad: working and travelling through Europe

<p>It&rsquo;s the world&rsquo;s biggest motorsport festival: as quintessentially bound up with the English summer as Wimbledon, and, though accessible, just as lavish and glamorous. Aptly described as &ldquo;motorsport's ultimate summer garden party,&rdquo; it takes place at the site of the historic Goodwood House near Chichester in West Sussex and attracts over 200,000 visitors over a long weekend. Few would quibble with the festival&rsquo;s claim that it is &ldquo;the world&rsquo;s greatest celebration of motorsport and car culture.&rdquo;</p>
<p>This year was the festival&rsquo;s 30th anniversary; it&rsquo;s a banner year too for Porsche and Lotus, with each conspicuously present at Goodwood as they celebrated 75 years of trading apiece, while McLaren Racing celebrated its sixtieth year. I was lucky enough to go, so what better place than the Gerrell &amp; Hard blog to share some of my personal highlights?</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.sourceflow.co.uk/wy4w8zfus9m8cz5sqbt14aa7ziy3" alt="Car" width="500" height="281"></p>
<h2>Electricity</h2>
<p>To nobody&rsquo;s surprise, an inescapable highlight of the festival was the plethora of plugins on display, many of them stunning. They included the Audi Hoonitron, a one-off electric monster boasting 1,400 horsepower, showcased with Audi Le Mans legend Tom Kristensen in the driving seat; the Porsche Mission X: a potential future supercar that qualifies as one of the most &ldquo;wow&rdquo; things on four wheels that I&rsquo;ve seen; the Pininfarina Battista Nino Farina: a sleek hypercar limited to five units; the Caterham Project V: a stunning lightweight electric sportscar from Caterham that could be available by 2025, and the Polestar 3: an electric crossover SUV of real elegance. No coyness about our partnership with Polestar will prevent me from expressing my admiration for this car.</p>
<p>​</p>
<h2>​The Hyundai Ionic 5N debut</h2>
<p>A clear highlight for many at the festival judging by the reception it got, Hyundai&rsquo;s new electric hot hatch was launched by racer and model Jodie Kidd, Goodwood Estate owner the Duke of Richmond and Hyundai President Jae Hoon Chang. It is Hyundai&rsquo;s inaugural high-performance electric model and a testament to the company&rsquo;s electrified future, offering EV-lovers a chance to have some fun. Seen in action at close range, the Ionic is fantastically exciting and a very marketable car. It&rsquo;s great to see what Hyundai is doing with its electric range and performance brands.</p>
<p>​</p>
<h2>The Hillclimb</h2>
<p>The famous Goodwood hillclimb is an opportunity for sportscar manufacturers, race teams and drivers to show off their racing credentials. Just over a mile long, the Duke&rsquo;s driveway runs through the centre of the estate and is annually transformed into one of the world&rsquo;s most challenging motor racing courses as elite drivers challenge each other to a &ldquo;Sunday Shootout.&rdquo; In 2022 Max Chilton set a record of 39.08 seconds in a McMurtry Sp&eacute;irling. This year&rsquo;s winner was Marvin Kirchh&ouml;fer, who put in a fantastic round of 45:34 seconds in his McLaren Solus GT. Always a festival highlight.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.goodwood.com/grr/event-coverage/festival-of-speed/2023/7/2023-festival-of-speed-timed-shootout-results/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Watch the practice runs</a>.</p>
<p>​</p>
<h2>INEOS&rsquo;s Grenadier programme</h2>
<p>INEOS Automotive had a fantastic showing at the festival, showcasing a range of innovations and its brand-new Grenadier Quartermaster double cab pick-up, which took the lead in a stunt to honour of the 75th anniversaries of Goodwood Motorsports and the Belstaff Trialmaster motorcycle jacket. INEOS and Belstaff collaborated to assemble a lineup of 75 vintage and contemporary off-road motorcycles for the renowned hillclimb, led by a Quartermaster truck and guided by seven-time motorcycle trials world champion Dougie Lampkin, who treated the crowds to an exhibition of motorcycle stunts using the Quartermaster as a prop.</p>
<p>​</p>
<h2>Autonomous mobility pods</h2>
<p>Festivalgoers who wanted to feel like they really were staring into the face of the future could check out Italdesign&rsquo;s mobility innovation project, Climb-E. The concept is described by the company as &ldquo;an autonomous transportation concept that can guarantee a seamless private travel experience and a series of services straight to people&rsquo;s doors, thanks to its complete capacity to integrate into next-gen and future civil and residential building structures.&rdquo; I prefer to think of it as an autonomous mobility pod that could transport people around an inner city like a taxi, and can also move up and down like a lift. It&rsquo;s amazing, and I&rsquo;ll be mentally filing this next to the Arrival Chemie EV concept and Zoox: it represents a future where mobility is about riding in small electric autonomous vehicles that can theoretically deposit us almost anywhere we need to go.</p>
<p>​</p>
<h2>Other highlights</h2>
<p>Gordon Murray Design showcased some incredible supercars: the T33 and the T50 are beautiful, with tiny physical footprints for vehicles boasting so much technology. If any cars can be called art, it&rsquo;s these.</p>
<p>Chinese car brand NIO debuted its ET5 at Goodwood prior to a planned but as-yet-unspecified UK launch. The brand intends to bring not just its cars but its wraparound services, such as battery swapping and NIO Houses, to the domestic market. It stands out as a strong entrant to the European market, where it has already launched in some countries.</p>
<p>So many more brands and technologies caught my eye, but I&rsquo;ll finish on a note that seems appropriate for a festival where nostalgia rubs shoulders with innovation. To mark its sixtieth year, the McLaren Racing stand contrasted old and new, with modern cars alongside famous historic models such as the MP4/8 of Ayrton Senna. It was a poignant touch: a reminder of the legends of the past and the continually evolving nature of motorsport and mobility.</p>
<p>​</p>
<p><strong>Got your own FoS highlights? Feel free to share them with us on our&nbsp;</strong><a href="https://twitter.com/gerrellandhard" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Twitter/X Feed</strong></a><strong>&nbsp;or&nbsp;</strong><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/gerrell-&amp;-hard-ltd" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>LinkedIn Company page</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><strong><img src="https://cdn.sourceflow.co.uk/9qoxgb2xoooo1wnsqvmzj6f5dpqj" alt="cars" width="600" height="338"></strong></p>
<p><strong><img src="https://cdn.sourceflow.co.uk/kvhtu2nej4uwa45szpzq5156yydt" alt="car show" width="600" height="337"></strong></p>
<p><strong><img src="https://cdn.sourceflow.co.uk/bpxz7xqhnjmclr0sj6629gfjxcqh" alt="robot" width="600" height="338"></strong></p>

Highlights from The Goodwood Festival of Speed 2023

<p>This month we&rsquo;re pleased to publish an interview with a great friend of Gerrell &amp; Hard, Paul Checkley. Never one to shy away from a challenge, early in 2021 Paul decided to relocate from the Midlands to Croatia for a role as Head of Logistics at Rimac Automobili, before his rapid promotion to Head of Supply Chain.</p>
<p>Founded by Mate Rimac in 2009, Rimac is a Croatian electric hyper sports car, drivetrain and battery systems manufacturer based at Sveta Nedelja. At the time of production its first vehicle, the Concept One, was the world&rsquo;s fastest production electric vehicle. Now merged with Bugatti, Rimac has delivered its new Nevera &ndash; the ultimate electric hypercar and the world&rsquo;s fastest production vehicle.</p>
<h3>Thanks for your time Paul. Talk us through your experience of how the role at Rimac came about.&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>
<p>I had retired after close to thirty years at a motorcycle brand when I was approached by Nick Gerrell for a senior logistics role at Rimac Automobili. I&rsquo;d already spoken to Nick about a couple of other roles; he took a personal interest in my journey that I found surprising and motivating, and he kept very close to the detail. It was a relationship I really enjoyed.</p>
<p>When Nick asked if he could share my CV with Rimac I was only too pleased to agree. I had to tell my wife I was potentially in contention for a role in Croatia!</p>
<p>Rimac flew me out to spend seven days and nights in Croatia, where I spent a lot of time getting to know Rimac Automobili and the team there. It was inspiring and everyone was incredibly approachable.</p>
<p>The conversations continued when I got back home. I liked the company, but a job there would represent a big change. We have elderly family members so we had to talk it through and think a lot about the implications should I take the role.</p>
<p>Even so, at that stage it all felt quite hypothetical, so when I got the offer letter from Rimac it was an abrupt reality check: this was really happening now. I had to respond to the letter within five days and it sat on the kitchen table for three days while conversations between my wife and I became more frequent, and quite intense! Crucially, I always felt more excitement than concern; I had the insurance of knowing that I could take the opportunity because I wanted it, not because I needed it. I was interested in the role because I wanted to be engaged and excited by a job and the company culture.</p>
<p>So I took the job. I moved alone from a spacious house in the Midlands to an apartment in Croatia, with everything I thought I&rsquo;d need from 55 years of life carried in two holdalls! It was a challenge and early on there were a couple of occasions when I wondered what I&rsquo;d done - but in those moments I was sustained by the excitement and dynamism of the company and the support and warmth of my colleagues and leadership team. My colleagues and the people out here are fantastic, incredibly welcoming and friendly.</p>
<p>After only a few months as Head of Logistics at Rimac I became Head of Supply Chain which includes logistics and purchasing, so it&rsquo;s been a really exciting time. There&rsquo;s a lot of variety in my role and our merger with Bugatti has meant that I now wear many hats. And the partnership has provoked a certain &ldquo;wow&rdquo; factor amongst many of my friends and family, especially any engineers I know!</p>
<h3>What do you especially enjoy about Croatia?</h3>
<p>The beautiful weather means outdoor living takes on a different meaning here compared to the UK. When I was finding my feet I&rsquo;d be able to go for a walk and sit outside a caf&eacute; or bar - when allowable, since I started here during the pandemic - and people would be laughing and joking and drinking coffee. The friendly, social culture here is so refreshing; you can easily get involved in conversations with strangers. And summer here would make any English person question why they&rsquo;d ever want to be back home!</p>
<p>The language isn&rsquo;t a challenge either. I&rsquo;m afraid that like many English people I&rsquo;m lazy when it comes to languages so I&rsquo;m fortunate that English is widely spoken here. I&rsquo;m trying though, but I tend to bungle some key phrases. But at least I make my colleagues laugh.</p>
<p>The people are lovely here; strangers are so friendly that it&rsquo;s initially a bit of a culture shock. My team are fantastic and the engagement has been brilliant &ndash; I have a lot of respect for them and receive a lot back. It really is a super-supportive environment. When I moved out here I was picked up by a member of the HR team who told me it was nice to have someone from outside the country joining the business, and that they were looking forward to learning from me. That&rsquo;s typical of the positive, welcoming and humble attitude of the people I&rsquo;m surrounded by.</p>
<h3>What have been your biggest challenges?</h3>
<p>There&rsquo;s been a substantial mental challenge to travelling during the pandemic and the safety measures I&rsquo;ve had to take, and like all people I miss my loved ones at home. My wife hasn&rsquo;t joined me out here yet but should soon, and I can talk to her or chat on WhatsApp any time, though sadly I can&rsquo;t WhatsApp my dog! I have my moments where I feel the distance from home, but it&rsquo;s mostly good and I&rsquo;m having a lot of fun. I&rsquo;ve viewed over thirty houses with a view to buying out here but it&rsquo;s not like the UK market, so it&rsquo;s a slow process.</p>
<h3>How would you describe the company culture at Rimac?</h3>
<p>Fantastic &ndash; it is relaxed but very professional, disciplined and ambitious. The ambition here is clear for all to see, there is a very bold and ambitious roadmap for the business, by the whole team. At the same time, everyone here feels greatly appreciated for their input, the dress code is very relaxed and we&rsquo;re dog-friendly, which is highly motivating and great for morale! I&rsquo;m still acclimatising to this joyous mixture of bold ambition and a relaxed, laid-back culture. It&rsquo;s great.</p>
<h3>What have been your key learning points about relocating to Croatia?</h3>
<p>I&rsquo;m working in a culture that is fundamentally different to ours in the UK. Croats are generally much more laid back than we are. More often than not this is really energising and enjoyable for me, but I&rsquo;ve had to adapt and understand that there are different ways to get things done and I need to manage people differently. I love that people are so positive here; if you&rsquo;ve got money for beer or coffee, life is good. That attitude has proven really useful already, because we&rsquo;ve taken a lot on at Rimac. It&rsquo;s rewarding to see how a fundamentally different perspective on work can make a challenging workload much more enjoyable than it would be in the UK.</p>
<p>My colleagues and friends here are having a positive effect on me. I&rsquo;ve always been very bad at relaxing, even on holiday, but since moving to Croatia I have become a little more laid back. My daughter commented on it a couple of weeks ago. There was a national holiday here so I took a few days off to visit my daughter. She found it hard to believe that I just wanted to relax and spend time doing so!</p>
<h3>What&rsquo;s your take on your new boss?</h3>
<p>He&rsquo;s inspiring. He&rsquo;s a visionary and super intelligent, and he puts ideas across very well. He sees our roadmap as a curve, even though it&rsquo;s pretty challenging and dynamic, and I love that. And he is still only a young guy. I have the experience of working with more established brands and I can see areas where I can support his vision and ambitious ideas and help overcome any barriers we may encounter. I can see how the merger brings 2 different companies together who can both learn from each other.</p>
<h3>That&rsquo;s a reminder that this is a big responsibility you&rsquo;ve take on. What do you bring to it?</h3>
<p>I don&rsquo;t think there&rsquo;s much in this sector that I haven&rsquo;t experienced! I&rsquo;ve run quality, engineering, purchasing, supply chain, customer service and many more teams, had strongly commercial aspects to my roles and taken on some fantastic special projects that have involved a lot of travel and some pretty hefty project management. There&rsquo;s loads of intelligence at Rimac and I bring a lot of pragmatic experience to that. In the course of my career I&rsquo;ve also worked with some influential individuals so I&rsquo;d like to think I&rsquo;m comfortable and pretty credible with anyone &ndash; they&rsquo;re all just people, after all. I am not sure if I could have done this role ten years ago &ndash; life experience has given me a lot.</p>
<h3>You&rsquo;ve clearly embraced both your role and your new home fully&hellip;</h3>
<p>Yes, I mentioned earlier that my motivation for this role is that I wanted it. I throw myself completely into any job I do, so being okay with your position in life when you&rsquo;re working is a bit like climbing with a safety harness on: you soon forget you&rsquo;re wearing a harness. You need to embed yourself with your employer and commit fully to the job. I was delighted to be promoted so soon, because I saw that as a statement of their trust in me and recognition of my commitment. I told Nick at Gerrell &amp; Hard that I wanted a fresh challenge and my job is delivering on that.</p>
<p>My approach to my career now is: when the fun stops, stop! But I&rsquo;m loving my new role and I hope it lasts a long time. I can imagine retiring and living in Croatia and I&rsquo;m going to see how the job develops. I am open-minded and I love that so far, it is challenging and rewarding.</p>
<h3>Thanks Paul.&nbsp;</h3>
<p>Thank you!</p>

Changing lives: late-career relocating

<h5>The pandemic created many challenges, many of them grave.&nbsp;If your biggest problem was having to adapt to new working conditions, many might consider you lucky. Nonetheless, the rapid transition of many employers from centralised to decentralised working was one of the quiet success stories of the pandemic era, with many managing it admirably.</h5>
<p>At Gerrell &amp; Hard we consider ourselves lucky. Like all businesses we took a hit as employers furloughed staff, took stock and waited to see what the &ldquo;new normal&rdquo; might look like. But we&rsquo;re fortunate to work in some of the most progressive and rapidly-emerging technological sectors, and for a proportion of our clients, the expansion didn&rsquo;t slow.</p>
<p>Recruiting and onboarding new staff remotely presents a challenge, especially when that involves designing and deploying full-scale assessment centres. But that&rsquo;s something we managed to do for (and with) Polestar, a rapidly-emerging force in the EV world.</p>
<h3>A hiring curveball</h3>
<p>Polestar found itself needing a fresh cohort of outstanding candidates for 2020, and asked Gerrell &amp; Hard to repeat the successful assessment centre we managed for the brand in 2019. An agile manufacturer, Polestar&rsquo;s hiring mirrors its business model, which means it needs to closely vet candidates, hiring people who work well together and assimilate into the business quickly.</p>
<p>A Polestar candidate&rsquo;s potential, flexibility, eagerness to learn and ability to work with others is crucial; as a hiring partner, we needed to identify engineers that balanced &nbsp;professional experience with these qualities. Assessment centres were therefore a perfect hiring tool for the brand.</p>
<p>We had already qualified and sustained the interest of a large pool of candidates when the pandemic required the Polestar and Gerrell &amp; Hard teams to collaborate on radically changing our plans. Polestar were quick to recognise the issue and embrace the need to resolve it swiftly; with just over two weeks until the assessment date and candidates already invited, we transformed the session to a virtual event while preserving the conditions and methodology required.</p>
<p>Polestar has form overcoming pandemic-enforced limitations on face time with key stakeholders: when the company opened its showroom in Shepherd&rsquo;s Bush it responded to the limits imposed by the pandemic by sending journalists an &ldquo;event kit in a box&rdquo; so they could remotely experience the opening in style. Inspired by this, example, we worked with Polestar to create and sent to candidates an &ldquo;assessment kit in a box,&rdquo; consisting of various problem-solving challenges they would need to work with others to solve, since no one candidate would receive every component of the puzzle.</p>
<p>Each candidate underwent half a day of remote technical group activities, along with one-to-one interviews and tasks with other engineers. Management of the assessment sessions was complex, involving group activities and breakout rooms for interviews with multiple staff.</p>
<p>By the time they completed the assessment centre, our candidates had been thoroughly vetted through an extended process of engagement. Their CVs had been reviewed by a number of Polestar staff. They had completed psychological profiling and created an introductory video. Their adaptability and ability to work with others had been evidenced and reviewed in a real-life working scenario. Our candidate funnel was watertight: from a very large candidate pool, all shortlisted individuals attended the assessment centre, with zero &ldquo;no-shows&rdquo;; a credit to the commitment and candidate nurturing from Polestar and our dedicated project team throughout the full recruitment lifecycle.</p>
<h3>Impact</h3>
<p>Polestar&rsquo;s virtual assessment centre was the product of rewarding collaboration, our teams working together to create and deploy a compelling and effective assessment package in just over two weeks midway through a significant hiring project. As a result, Polestar successfully hired a large cohort of excellent candidates, whose feedback about its assessment centre was extremely positive.</p>
<h3>Enjoying the challenge</h3>
<p>The Polestar assessment centre is something the Gerrell &amp; Hard team is hugely proud of, and greatly enjoyed. We&rsquo;re grateful to the team there for working with us and trusting us with a major hiring project at an especially challenging moment in time. We have created a blueprint for remote assessment centres &ndash; notwithstanding some client-specific details that, of course, remain with Polestar. Whether and to what extent we&rsquo;ll need to replicate this approach, adapted to reflect clients&rsquo; hiring specifics, we don&rsquo;t yet know. But we have learned valuable lessons about hiring in the pandemic and we&rsquo;re ready and able to apply them.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.gerrellandhard.co.uk/clients/polestar?source=google.com" data-cke-saved-href="https://www.gerrellandhard.co.uk/clients/polestar">Read and download our Polestar case study</a></p>

Rising to the challenge - Polestar's pandemic assessment centre

<h5>We at Gerrell &amp; Hard are fascinated by the sectors we work in, and do all we can to monitor the pulse of our ever-transforming industries. It doesn&rsquo;t always have to be hard work, either; podcasts are a great way to keep ahead of the curve and are good company too, especially while we work from home.</h5>
<p>And therein lies a lot of their appeal: in the era of increased remote working, podcasts have boomed. Spotify podcasts alone have more-than tripled in a year, from 700,000 in the final quarter of 2019 to 2.2m at the end of 2020. Last year, well over 15 million people in the UK listened to podcasts.</p>
<p>Matey, familiar and with something for almost any interest, podcasts are a welcome tonic to the isolation of working from home. Here are our favourites from tech, engineering and other Gerrell &amp; Hard related sectors. And please, let us know your techy favourites because we&rsquo;re always on the lookout for more!</p>
<h2>Fully charged [<a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5Y2gu0zZYruYTTqq3J4l7y" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Listen</a>]</h2>
<p>The world&rsquo;s number one clean energy and EV channel and one of our go-to &lsquo;casts for passionate but gentle banter about an ever-evolving subject. To quote its website, &lsquo;the origins of&nbsp;Fully Charged&nbsp;lay in the question, &ldquo;is it possible for humans to no longer need to burn things to live, to work and to travel?&rdquo;&rsquo; And if that&rsquo;s not a noble basis for an ongoing conversation, what is? &nbsp;</p>
<p>Founded and presented by actor and writer Robert Llewellyn (perhaps best known as Kryten from comedy series &ldquo;Red Dwarf&rdquo;) it is described as &ldquo;filled with interesting stories, almost breaking news, a pinch of wit and&hellip;.a few guests who actually know what is going on in the world of EVs, renewable energy and sustainability&rdquo;. Co-presenters include some familiar names with outstanding CVs from broadcast and tech: Maddie Moate, Rory Reid, Helen Czerski, Chelsea Sexton and Andy Torbet.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Sample episode:</strong>&nbsp;<a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/03M73GwoxjfHMUvfWNy3xi" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode/03M73GwoxjfHMUvfWNy3xi</a></p>
<p>Here, Robert chats to Alex Voigt, an occasionally-controversial German engineer, on why Electric cars are still more expensive than their combustion-based forebears.</p>
<h2>Leaders in Cleantech&nbsp;[<a href="http://open.spotify.com/show/5tXQYrCL89optwyJz8WZPI" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Listen</a>]</h2>
<p>In this weekly podcast, Cleantech thought leader and green entrepreneur David Hunt speaks with Cleantech CEOs and leaders about the challenges, successes and failures they have faced in renewable, energy storage and related industries, and hears their predictions for the sectors. Perfect listening for anyone who wants to stay at the forefront of innovation, because if any one theme unites a wide range of tech and industry sectors, it&rsquo;s the drive towards sustainability.</p>
<p><strong>Sample episode:</strong>&nbsp;<a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/5yfgnuhro6V36ozdzTJgod" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode/5yfgnuhro6V36ozdzTJgod</a></p>
<p>Here, author Gretchen Bakke talks about her book &ldquo;The Grid&rdquo;, which is informed by her fascination with what happens when the systems we rely on start to fail us. Bill Gates files this under &ldquo;One of my favourite genres: books about mundane stuff that is actually fascinating.&rdquo;</p>
<h2>The Accidental Tech podcast&nbsp;[<a href="http://atp.fm/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Listen</a>]</h2>
<p>Geek alert: this is for die-hard techies who dream in code. Describing itself as &ldquo;a tech podcast we accidentally created when we tried to do a car show&rdquo; and &ldquo;Three nerds discussing tech, Apple, programming, and loosely related matters,&rdquo; this is hosted by developers Marco Arment, Casey Liss, John Siracusa, who get into things in a way that uber-geeks will love: one of the &lsquo;casters describes his green tea going down the wrong way as a &ldquo;wrong type exception&rdquo;.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Sample episode:</strong>&nbsp;<a href="https://atp.fm/425" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://atp.fm/425</a></p>
<p>Here, the team talks vaccines, Oracle versus Google, the next Apple CEO, and BMW vs. CarPlay.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<h2>Women Tech Charge [<a href="http://play.acast.com/s/womentechcharge" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Listen</a>]</h2>
<p>A podcast from the Evening Standard, Women Tech Charge is hosted by Stemettes founder and CEO Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon and &ldquo;puts women&rsquo;s experiences in tech front and centre&rdquo;. Each episode sees Imafidon interview a woman in STEM on her life, work and the challenges they&rsquo;ve faced in the industry.</p>
<p><strong>Sample episode:</strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="https://play.acast.com/s/womentechcharge/newepisode-explorerkathysullivan-whatsitliketogotospaceandthedeepestpartoftheocean-" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://play.acast.com/s/womentechcharge/newepisode-explorerkathysullivan-whatsitliketogotospaceandthedeepestpartoftheocean-</a></p>
<p>Here, explorer Kathy Sullivan chats about what it&rsquo;s like to cross the two greatest frontiers we know of, as she recounts her experience travelling into space and the deepest part of the ocean.</p>
<h2>TED talks daily&nbsp;[<a href="http://player.fm/series/tedtalks-audio" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Listen</a>]</h2>
<p>Not a pure tech &lsquo;cast, but this is a broad and enriching show for anyone who loves learning and especially those who find themselves dipping into TED footage on You Tube. The sheer variety of ideas and perspectives on show is what makes TED talks so fascinating and there are plenty of tech talks on offer.</p>
<p><strong>Sample episode:</strong>&nbsp;<a href="https://player.fm/series/tedtalks-audio/possible-futures-from-the-intersection-of-nature-tech-and-society-natsai-audrey-chieza" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://player.fm/series/tedtalks-audio/possible-futures-from-the-intersection-of-nature-tech-and-society-natsai-audrey-chieza</a></p>
<p>Here, Biodesigner Natsai Audrey Chieza shares the vision behind her innovation lab, which creates sustainable materials and models of how people can work in the future.</p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>Just five of many great techy podcasts out there &ndash; do tweet your favourites to&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/gerrellandhard" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@gerrellandhard</a>; they may even feature in a future blog!</p>

Five podcasts for tech fans

<h2>Reframing redundancy: the many values of volunteering</h2>
<h5>A guest interview with Carl Stopforth</h5>
<p>This month we&rsquo;re delighted to publish an interview with a great friend of Gerrell &amp; Hard, Carl Stopforth. Through no fault of his own, Carl has faced periods where he was out of work, but has used this time to help others while also looking for his next role. He has gained a lot from it, not least renewed self-confidence and an understanding of the value of looking outwards during periods of stress.</p>
<p>We think Carl&rsquo;s story is an inspiring one that we can all take something from, so we&rsquo;re delighted that he agreed to be interviewed for a blog. Thanks Carl for your time and your honesty.</p>
<h3>Carl, can you give us a potted history of your experience of being out of work and the relevant periods of your career? &nbsp;</h3>
<p>My first period out of work came after I moved to Ricardo having spent ten years at TRW (now part of ZF Friedrichshafen AG). I spent my last three years at TRW in Germany. It was an enjoyable period but I felt I had gone as far as I could there and decided to move on, a big decision at the time. I moved to Ricardo in June 2008 and was there for over two years before being made redundant as a consequence of the financial crisis.</p>
<p>It was a shock. I hadn&rsquo;t done anything wrong, but that didn&rsquo;t change how I felt. Regardless of how redundancy is handled, it feels personal unless you&rsquo;ve gained some very specific coping skills, which my experience has given me!</p>
<p>I was offered the opportunity to return as a contractor but believed that if I hung on something I wanted more would come along at the right time. That&rsquo;s quite a big part of how I see things now: no matter how hard things are, I have always believed I&rsquo;ll look back and know there&rsquo;s a reason why things happened as they did.</p>
<p>Then my role as an Interim Senior Project Manager at Protean came up. I welcomed the chance to work in a privately-funded corporation, though an interim role in the early days of a start-up felt like a gamble. While I was there decisions were made to change the organisational structure, which brought an end to my contract. I thought, &ldquo;here we go again!&rdquo;</p>
<p>Then I spent about a year as a Project Leader at Alexander Dennis before being headhunted for a Global Project Manager role with Hyva in the Netherlands. I had broad experience in project management and it felt like this was what ending my time at Protean and Alexander Dennis had been for. Here was a chance to run my own department, be responsible for other people and grow a function. But sadly I was made redundant again &ndash; and this time I was stuck in Holland! That was tough, but again my attitude was &ldquo;this isn&rsquo;t right, but it has happened and I will find out why in the future &ndash; one day this will be an event that led to something better for me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>My next role was as a Programme Manager at Gurit - an advanced composites firm in the Isle of Wight. With no previous experience of composites I had to dive in, applying my project management skills to the challenge of relocating and learning a new role fast! But while I was there, a significant number of staff were made redundant, including me.</p>
<h3>You&rsquo;d already been volunteering at this point, but you stepped it up in a pretty big way at this time, which many will see as an interesting response to a succession of setbacks!</h3>
<p>Yes. While living on the Isle of Wight, my wife and I had started volunteering with a local boating club. So I decided to take some time out from the chaos of moving from one unstable role to another by volunteering with the RNLI in Cowes, all while looking for the right role.</p>
<h3>What was behind this decision?</h3>
<p>At this time it occurred to me that I needed a career break. Repeated blows to my confidence had been shattering; when you keep getting knocked over you can only convince yourself to get back up again so many times. I was getting fed up and losing the will to renew myself through challenge after challenge. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>I spent just over a year volunteering at the local lifeboat station, all the while slowly realising that for my next role, whoever hired me would have to convince me they were the right employer for me rather than the other way round. This was a new mind-set and it was something to do with me recognising the value in my volunteer work. I started to be careful about which recruitment agencies I spoke to, choosing only those who were really interested in the individual at the end of the phone.</p>
<p>At this time I heard word that Lentus Composites in Oxford was a rising star, so I contacted them directly with renewed confidence. I carried this belief into the interview process and within two weeks was working for the business as a Programme Manager.&nbsp; But despite a great start, the business had its problems and a number of people were made redundant, including me.</p>
<h3>How did you take it?</h3>
<p>Differently this time. I was feeling energised and positive because of my time volunteering with the RNLI and I&rsquo;d made a conscious decision not to be defeated by another job loss. I had a notable shift in mentality that came from doing things for other people. I felt lucky to have had the chance to give my time to others and financially I was okay for a while because I&rsquo;d saved. I thought, &ldquo;don&rsquo;t be scared,&rdquo; and decided to volunteer again, this time with London Search and Rescue (LonSAR), part of the Association of Lowland Search and Rescue, qualifying alongside my wife to be a search and rescue technician and supporting the Metropolitan Police with missing person and body searches. It was gratifying to find my earlier voluntary work with the RNLI carried forward into this, as I was given responsibility for establishing a water section specifically for LonSAR.</p>
<h3>You still needed a job during this time and were also looking for work, weren&rsquo;t you?</h3>
<p>Absolutely. Everyone knows that finding and applying for a new role can be a full time job in itself, but what was key for me at this time was that my volunteering meant I couldn&rsquo;t treat job-hunting as a nine-to-five even if I wanted to.</p>
<p>That was a valuable lesson for me: when you don&rsquo;t have a job, you can con yourself into thinking that unless you dedicate every minute of every day to finding one, you have no chance of succeeding. But that&rsquo;s just a trick your stressed mind plays on you that doesn&rsquo;t help at all. You can&rsquo;t&nbsp;<em>productively</em>&nbsp;job hunt all day every day &ndash; there&rsquo;s only so much you can do. Volunteering took me out of my own head and stopped me feeling guilty because I wasn&rsquo;t on my laptop 24/7.</p>
<p>During this time I also did some further voluntary work with Leap Confronting Conflict, a national youth charity that provides conflict management programmes and support to young people. While I wasn&rsquo;t involved directly with the affected youths, I felt my work supporting management allowed them to spend more time focusing on this, meaning other people got something positive out of my situation.</p>
<h3>Did volunteering for charities that deal with people in tough circumstances present you with some upsetting experiences during an already stressful period?</h3>
<p>Well, yes, obviously no matter how bad your position feels, there are always people far worse off and that became pretty clear to me, but it&rsquo;s no good being preachy about that: it doesn&rsquo;t truly help your circumstances or mine to know this when we&rsquo;re out of a job. But how about knowing that there are people worse off than you&nbsp;<em>and</em>&nbsp;that you can help them? It gets you out of your shell if you can give something of yourself to others; it makes you feel more comfortable in your own skin. You&rsquo;re not being paid, but you&rsquo;re adding value.</p>
<p>This experience brought me to summer 2018 when, thanks to Gerrell &amp; Hard, I got my current role at Penso.&nbsp; Gerrell &amp; Hard had kept in touch and had been one of the good agencies who were focused on the individual. Penso is a successful company and I feel lucky that I&rsquo;m able to work through the pandemic without being put on furlough.&nbsp;</p>
<h3>Has the way you cope emotionally with redundancy changed?</h3>
<p>My experience of redundancy and of gaining a sense of personal value in my time out of work has made me philosophical about it, yes. When you&rsquo;re made redundant it feels personal and it knocks your confidence in the most horrible way. But it&rsquo;s not personal. The leaders who make these decisions don&rsquo;t do so lightly. They&rsquo;ve been where you are and we&rsquo;re all the same. The executive who signs off redundancies is also a person for whom this is not easy. To cite a well-worn phrase, it&rsquo;s not your experiences, but how you respond to them, that shapes your life.</p>
<h3>What advice would you offer to anyone who finds themselves out of work for an extended period?</h3>
<p>Some people will have a more pressing need to be back working than others. But most of us need work and if you&rsquo;ve lost your job it&rsquo;s tempting to spend all your available time trying to find a new one.</p>
<p>A job search will probably take longer than you want it to &ndash; but don&rsquo;t let that kid you into thinking you need to spend all day, every day on it. A lot of those hours will be &ldquo;junk hours&rdquo; where you&rsquo;re not being productive. Review your job alerts and then go and do something else. Spending all day every day on a job search will make you feel useless because there are limits to how productive you can be when there are only limited actions you can take.</p>
<p>I think of job-hunting as being like a sprint: do your 100 metres once a day, then do it again the next day and so on. You can spend a lot of time carpet-bombing all and sundry opportunities, but it&rsquo;s better to concentrate on finding quality opportunities and putting your effort into managing the next part of the process &ndash; working with a good agency, getting your CV up to scratch and selling yourself. Those daily sprints will have built you up and left you energy to get through the next part, which is nailing the job &ndash; that&rsquo;s the hard bit and it&rsquo;s where you really need to concentrate your energy.</p>
<h3>Volunteering means willingly giving. What has volunteering given you in return?</h3>
<p>After a number of blows to my confidence, voluntary work gave me the conviction that I&rsquo;m a person who&rsquo;s done valuable stuff in the most challenging periods, and I&rsquo;m more than &ldquo;just&rdquo; a job. It helped me to get out of the echo chamber of my mind and away from all the negative, ultimately useless thoughts I was having.</p>
<p>To volunteer you need a passion for the success of an organisation outside of yourself and you tend to carry that into employers: a determination not to fail the business, and for it not to fail you. I think that makes for a valuable employee - someone determined to be the best they can - and I think employers can see that in a CV.</p>
<p>Above all, volunteering means providing a service for someone who could really benefit from your time, and that is rewarding in itself.&nbsp; So in conclusion, it&rsquo;s a way to help other people, improve your CV and employability, and help you feel valued and productive in your down-time or between roles. &nbsp;</p>

Reframing redundancy

<h5>Few people enjoy negotiating, and even those whose career involves negotiating on behalf of their employer can feel uncomfortable when negotiating for themselves, such as when asking for a pay rise or promotion &ndash; I&rsquo;ll refer to these collectively as salary conversations.</h5>
<h3>The emotional baggage of negotiating</h3>
<p>When it comes to asking for more, most of us feel like we&rsquo;re putting ourselves at risk, which is why we feel fear. We fear the possibility of losing our jobs, of damaging a relationship, of lowering the esteem in which we&rsquo;re held. Our inner voice warns us: how dare we ask for more and expect there to be no consequences!</p>
<p>Or we may fear rejection - the fact of being told that, no, we can&rsquo;t have what we want - because it confirms our worst fear: we&rsquo;re not really worth it.</p>
<p>I think we fear this because we equate any &ldquo;no&rdquo;, no matter how qualified it is, with outright and total rejection. We hear the &ldquo;no&rdquo; and ignore everything that follows it, usually because we&rsquo;re too emotional or too busy beating ourselves up to care.</p>
<p>We may be told that we won&rsquo;t get our pay rise today, but that we can work towards one over the next few months. But it&rsquo;s the &ldquo;no&rdquo; we take away with us, so we feel defeated. We forget that even an outright &ldquo;no&rdquo; is more often about our employer than us.</p>
<p>So with all this baggage, it&rsquo;s no surprise that negotiating is a skill that comes naturally to few people. But there are some basic steps we can take to improve our success rate in these challenging conversations.</p>
<h3>Preparation</h3>
<h4>Know your boundaries</h4>
<p>One of the main reasons why salary negotiations end in disappointment is a lack of preparation.</p>
<p>The most important preparation you can do is to understand what success looks like for you before you enter into a negotiation. What are your minimum and maximum acceptable outcomes?</p>
<p>If you ask for more money, what&rsquo;s your dream figure, what&rsquo;s an acceptable amount and what&rsquo;s not acceptable to you? And is it just about the money, or can your employer offer you other things that might sweeten the deal? What about enhanced flexibility, learning and development (e.g. paying for courses that will improve your skillset) or additional benefits?</p>
<h4>Know your value and build a case</h4>
<p>The second bit of preparation you can do is to research and benchmark your role in other companies to see what salary it typically attracts, and have plenty of evidence of the value you&rsquo;ve added to your employer over the last review period.</p>
<p>Don&rsquo;t be upset that you might need to build a case for why you warrant a reward. It&rsquo;s natural that a business will expect you to make a case. If you&rsquo;ve hit targets and had an agreement based on that, have the evidence to hand. If you&rsquo;re in a creative role, bring examples of your best work to a salary negotiation (or establish beforehand whether you need to).</p>
<h4>Get the timing right</h4>
<p>If your salary negotiation entails you marching into your manager&rsquo;s office with no forewarning and demanding a pay rise, I wish you luck! &nbsp;</p>
<p>You should never surprise your manager with a demand like this. Firstly, they may need to make a case on your behalf to a Board and to liaise with HR. They need time to think, too &ndash; about what they can offer you, about any adjustments to your role and so on. And they need to factor a new salary into their budget.</p>
<p>When an employer grants an employee a promotion or a pay rise, there&rsquo;s work to be done for many staff: HR and the accounts department as a minimum. So plan accordingly and time your conversation so it&rsquo;s in advance of scheduled pay reviews or appraisals, with time for your manager to assess and action the case you make and the required follow up.</p>
<h4>Practise</h4>
<p>One last note about preparation: remember that many people find salary negotiations nerve-wracking. So find a friend or trusted peer and rehearse yours. Get used to framing the conversation and making your case. The more you do it, the more easily the right words will come when it counts.</p>
<h3>In the meeting</h3>
<h4>Don&rsquo;t pitch to please</h4>
<p>It takes strength to remember your preparation and stick to your guns when you&rsquo;re in the middle of a salary negotiation. In your preparation you thought about what constitutes an ideal pay rise, what&rsquo;s acceptable (what you&rsquo;ll settle for) and what&rsquo;s not acceptable.</p>
<p>But when it comes to negotiating, many people pitch at the level they&rsquo;re prepared to settle for out of a confused desire to avoid causing offence. This is a mistake: their manager doesn&rsquo;t know they&rsquo;re doing this, and so will assume they are pitching high and can be negotiated down.</p>
<p>This is why so many people end up disappointed, having been negotiated down to their minimum acceptable level. Actually, they&rsquo;ve only defeated themselves - the other party had no idea what they were thinking. It&rsquo;s better to pitch high and negotiate down towards the level you&rsquo;re happy with.</p>
<h4>Behaviours</h4>
<p>Once you&rsquo;ve stated your case and what you feel you&rsquo;re worth, don&rsquo;t be tempted to waffle (something that can easily happen if you&rsquo;re nervous). State your case and have the confidence to let your silence do the rest. &nbsp;</p>
<p>Try to switch to listening mode, as it&rsquo;s very important you hear what your manager says next. They may give you clear signals that a promotion or pay rise isn&rsquo;t on the cards today, but could be very soon if you hit certain milestones, and it&rsquo;s important this is the message you take away, rather than losing your cool because you don&rsquo;t immediately get what you want. Listening is a crucial part of negotiation, while anger rarely achieves anything.</p>
<h3>What else can you bring?</h3>
<p>Salary negotiations are a two-sided conversation, not just an &ldquo;I want&rdquo;. You need to put yourself in your employer&rsquo;s position. Your employer may have demands of their own, so be open to the possibility that they may wish you to take on additional responsibilities - normally pretty inevitable in a promotion conversation!</p>
<h3>Polite paper trails</h3>
<p>After your salary conversation, email your manager (or HR, as relevant) to thank them for their time and set out any agreed next steps, so you and they have a record of your meeting and the way forward.</p>
<p>Good luck, I hope this helps!</p>
<p><em>Jonathan</em></p>

How to negotiate a pay rise or promotion

<h5>Barely a month into 2020 and we&rsquo;re already entering the first hiring peak of the season, which means job seekers may be about to undergo assessments that can seem bewildering in variety and scope.&nbsp;</h5>
<p>So we thought we&rsquo;d kick off our blogging year by providing a guide to the most common forms of assessment, with tips to ensure you get the best out of each.</p>
<p>The most likely forms of assessment you&rsquo;ll face as a jobseeker are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Telephone or video interviews</li>
<li>Face to face interviews (one to one)</li>
<li>Panel Interviews</li>
<li>Assessment Days</li>
<li>Group Interviews</li>
<li>Psychometric Testing</li>
</ul>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<h2>Telephone and video interviews</h2>
<p>Both these forms of interview are usually part of an initial screening process. If you&rsquo;re selected for either it means your CV is interesting, but each interview can still be brief (often about twenty minutes to half an hour) and is normally about ascertaining whether you warrant a face to face interview. Both can be used to find out whether you can talk about your CV credibly.</p>
<p>So know your CV well and make sure you&rsquo;ve rehearsed talking about it. You need to create a good impression while being concise, so be courteous, honest and engaging.</p>
<p>Use the STAR method to answer competency-based questions &ndash; questions that designed to assess how you have previously deployed specific skills and competencies considered important in the context of the role. Competency-based questions encourage evidence-based answers from your own experience.</p>
<p>The STAR technique uses four steps to structure your response to these kind of questions:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Situation</strong>: Describe the situation in which the event took place.</li>
<li><strong>Task</strong>: Describe the task/issue/challenge/problem you had to complete/resolve. &nbsp;</li>
<li><strong>Action</strong>: Describe the action you took to achieve this.</li>
<li><strong>Results</strong>: Describe the results of your actions, emphasising any resulting success or changes.</li>
</ul>
<p>The above advice applies to all forms of interview, but a trick more specific to telephone and video interviews is to ensure you create the best possible conditions for the call. Make sure you won&rsquo;t be interrupted, that background noise is minimised and that you have your CV to hand.</p>
<p>Video interviews may be held over Zoom, Skype, Facetime or Google hangout. They provide the time and hassle-saving benefits of a phone call, whilst allowing hirers to get a better sense of a candidate&rsquo;s body language, presentation and, perhaps most tellingly, awareness of their environment.</p>
<p>In addition to the above, the key to acing a video interview is to think about the visual impression your chosen space will create in your interviewer. Prepare for a video interview as you would a face-to-face one, including your dress code, the amount of homework and research you do to prepare yourself for a role. But crucially, think about the cleanliness and tidiness of the room behind you, which will likely be noticed!</p>
<h2>One-to-one face-to-face interviews</h2>
<p>Still the classic form of candidate assessment. Much of the advice I&rsquo;ve given above applies here, but I&rsquo;d add that it&rsquo;s important you&rsquo;re comfortable with the route to the interview and that you have your (appropriate) attire ready to wear so you don&rsquo;t have to worry about anything other than acing the interview. Be sure you&rsquo;ve done your homework on the company and can talk through your CV as with a screening interview.</p>
<p>A piece of advice I routinely give my candidates is to print off a job specification, annotate it with your own observations and note down some examples of your relevant experience, so that in an interview you can easily provide evidence and show you&rsquo;ve thoroughly reviewed your own competency against requirements. (You can apply this to any other form of interview of course).</p>
<p>Although you never know what you&rsquo;re going to be asked, it&rsquo;s a good idea to think about some of the different kinds of questions you may face, and practise some answers. Here&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gerrellandhard.co.uk/blog/2019/09/beginners-guide-to-decoding-interview-questions">our previous blog about interview questions</a>.</p>
<p>Make sure you&rsquo;ve prepared some questions of your own for your interview. If you&rsquo;re neck-and-neck with another candidate, it could be your incisive questions that make the difference.</p>
<p>Some good examples include:</p>
<ul>
<li>What does success look like in this role?</li>
<li>What are the challenges facing this organisation that I could help with if I got the role?</li>
<li>What do you most enjoy about working here?</li>
<li>What is the expected progression path for this role?</li>
<li>What professional training or education do you offer?</li>
</ul>
<p>Last but certainly not least, try to know something about your interviewer. There&rsquo;s usually enough information available online for discerning candidates to learn about their interviewer&rsquo;s role in the company and, accordingly, their likely interest or standing in relation to the role being hired. Show awareness of this for extra credit.</p>
<div>&nbsp;</div>
<h2>Panel Interviews</h2>
<p>Panel interviews are often used for senior or complex hires. If a panel interview is part of a selection process it is usually (though not always) the most demanding or critical part.</p>
<p>Prepare for panel interviews as you would any other, paying close attention to the requirements of the role and having done a lot of homework about the company.</p>
<p>The single best thing you can do in a panel interview is to make sure you engage all interviewers with good eye contact and include all of them in your answer to any question, regardless of who asks it. Be sure to make everyone feel like they&rsquo;re part of the conversation: your social, self-awareness and presentation skills are being tested, as well as evidence of your skills and experience.</p>
<p>As with one-to-one interviews, you can gain additional kudos by knowing something about your panel, but here&rsquo;s where a panel interview can give you even more opportunity to shine: tailoring your response to each stakeholder, or showing you understand each of your panel&rsquo;s interest in the role being hired, is the pinnacle of interview performance.</p>
<h2>Assessment days</h2>
<p>Assessment days are quite common amongst larger firms, especially when they hire a sizeable intake of graduates all at once, as many do. They are used to gauge the skills and appropriateness of a number of individuals, and, sometimes, to sort already-shortlisted candidates into specific roles.</p>
<p>Assessment days may feature a variety of different tasks or scenarios, all of which are monitored, including group challenges where a number of candidates have to work together to find the solution to a problem, learn about and present on a stipulated topic, or complete a set task. They can also include interviews, tests and presentations.</p>
<p>Assessment days tend to test for role-specific hard skills as well as aptitude or potential, and candidates&rsquo; ability to work well with one another. Group tasks are often used to assess the social and professional dynamics of potential employees.</p>
<p>There&rsquo;s no golden ticket for acing assessment days. Rather, the key to performing well is to prepare as you would for any demanding, potentially tiring task: do your homework (on the company, the role you&rsquo;re applying for and your own CV. If you can find out what exercises the day will include, all the better.) Think about what you can offer, dress appropriately and ensure you&rsquo;re fresh, rested, well prepared and fully briefed for the big day - eat healthily and hydrate well in the days beforehand.</p>
<p>As with an interview, ensure you know your route to the assessment centre so you don&rsquo;t spend the journey panicking, and don&rsquo;t leave anything to chance.</p>
<p>On the day, be mindful of your behaviour: contribute to group tasks but don&rsquo;t steamroller other candidates, as your behaviour and ability to work with others will certainly be noted, as well as your technical competence. And though it&rsquo;s easier said than done when the pressure is on, try to be true to yourself. Be authentic, while being courteous to others.</p>
<h2>Group interviews</h2>
<p>Relatively rare in my experience, group interviews are a sort of abbreviated assessment day for a sizeable intake of interviewees and are most useful for when teamwork is a key part of a role or roles, allowing a panel of interviewers to assess how a group of interviewees interacts and reacts to one another.</p>
<p>The key to performing well in group interviews is to ensure you acknowledge other members of the group and get your opportunity to respond to questions without dominating proceedings or other members of the group. In all other ways, prepare as you would for a normal interview.</p>
<h2>Psychometric testing</h2>
<p>Some employers ask candidates to complete online or paper-based psychometric tests as part of an overall assessment. These tests can help provide a deeper understanding of candidates&rsquo; skills or character beyond what a CV or even a face-to-face interview can reveal.</p>
<p>Psychometric tests have the further advantage of removing bias from the assessment process, or acting as a corrective to an interviewer&rsquo;s unconscious bias &ndash; perhaps by making an interviewer re-think their initial perception of a candidate. That being said, psychometric tests can come at any stage of the hiring process, and may occasionally be used to screen candidates early on, before an interview.</p>
<p>Psychometric tests are generally grouped into&nbsp;<em>aptitude&nbsp;</em>and&nbsp;<em>personality&nbsp;</em>tests. Aptitude tests assess candidates&rsquo; technical skill in numeracy, language, reasoning or the hard skills required in a particular role. Personality tests assess emotional intelligence, motivation, behaviour and working styles.</p>
<p>The key to performing well in these tests is to check job adverts and specifications to determine the likely required behaviours and skills, and try using some online resources such as these below to help you develop your technique when responding to questions: &nbsp;<a href="http://www.practiceaptitudetests.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.practiceaptitudetests.com</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href="https://www.prospects.ac.uk/careers-advice/interview-tips/psychometric-tests" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.prospects.ac.uk/careers-advice/interview-tips/psychometric-tests</a></p>
<p>There&rsquo;s no right or wrong answer in personality tests, so the best way to approach them is to be completely honest.</p>
<p>A final tip: it&rsquo;s useful to know whether you&rsquo;ll be deducted points for unanswered questions in psychometric tests. If so, be sure not to dwell too long on each question and answer as many as you can. But at the same time, always ensure you understand the question fully before you answer; read each carefully as you would in a standard exam.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p><em>Simon</em></p>

A guide to the most common candidate assessments

<p>Your new role will throw a few surprises at you, but get all the groundwork right and those surprises won&rsquo;t unduly faze you. &nbsp;</p>
<p>There are various kinds of preparation for a new role. The most obvious and simplest is housekeeping: the simple acts that ensure you won&rsquo;t spend unnecessary time and energy worrying about trivial distractions in your first day or week.</p>
<p>Then there&rsquo;s the bigger-picture stuff that&rsquo;s about orienting yourself within the larger organisation and laying the groundwork for good performance in your role. For convenience, I&rsquo;ll call it &ldquo;laying foundations&rdquo;.&nbsp;</p>
<p>And perhaps somewhere in between are the positive actions and behaviours you can adopt in your first few weeks that will help you to get the best out of your time and the people around you.</p>
<p>You can start your preparation even before you interview for a job. If your interviews consist of several stages and you find yourself progressing through all of them, you can increasingly prepare to perform well in a role, should you get it.</p>
<h3>Housekeeping</h3>
<h4>Life laundry</h4>
<p>The last thing you need in your first week in a new role is stress-inducing distractions. Get your life laundry in order so you don&rsquo;t have to worry about work outfits, lunches and the commute to work. Do all you can to ensure nothing keeps you from the all-important objective of a week of full concentration!</p>
<p>I&rsquo;d suggest avoiding making extra-curricular plans, making sure you&rsquo;ve got all your lunch ingredients to hand, all of your work clothes ready for a week and that you know your commute like the back of your hand. If possible, do dry runs of your commute, at peak travelling times. Make sure you&rsquo;ve got a full tank of petrol/travel tickets/passes and so on. Don&rsquo;t leave anything to chance. And why not set your alarm a little early?</p>
<h4>First day survival kit</h4>
<p>You never know what your first day in a new role might produce, so I&rsquo;d recommend coming prepared for pretty much anything. Bring pens/notepad (or other note-taking technology as permitted), cash, cards, lunch, and your (switched-off) phone as standard.</p>
<h4>Learn the layout/tools</h4>
<p>Familiarise yourself with the layout of your workspace as soon as possible. Where are the meeting rooms, canteen, toilets, fire escape and so on? Is there a protocol for booking meeting rooms? The same applies to the fundamental tools of your job. What software or systems will you need to use? Ensure you&rsquo;re as familiar with any new tools as you can be by the time you start.</p>
<h3>Positive Actions/Behaviours</h3>
<h4>Goals and development</h4>
<p>Understand the goals and drivers of your role and identify where you might spend time learning more about an aspect of the business, another team or developing a particular element of your skillset to align to those goals.</p>
<h4>Ask questions</h4>
<p>To paraphrase an old proverb, you can either ask questions and feel like a fool for a moment, or not ask them and look like a fool forever.</p>
<p>Regardless of how clued up you are on the particular jargon of your profession, a new workplace will have its own language, idioms and sub-culture that will seem alien to you.</p>
<p>You won&rsquo;t look foolish when you ask for clarification on anything you don&rsquo;t understand. If you&rsquo;re embarrassed to show ignorance on day one, think how you&rsquo;ll feel six months in when you still don&rsquo;t know what X and Y refers to and everyone&rsquo;s bandying those elusive terms about.</p>
<p>So jot down everything and anything that&rsquo;s new. Pretty soon the in-talk will start to make sense to you, and you won&rsquo;t miss valuable insights from a new colleague because you&rsquo;re fixating upon a new and strange term they used half a minute earlier.</p>
<h4>Make work a priority</h4>
<p>While you don&rsquo;t want to set a precedent that suggests you&rsquo;re the kind of person who enjoys working until 8pm every night (and thankfully most employers will question why you&rsquo;d need to), it&rsquo;s a good idea to show willing and put in some graft, provided it&rsquo;s for a good reason. Don&rsquo;t work late for the sake of it though. You&rsquo;re better off doing a good honest shift of fine work in your core hours than making an early impression of someone who is insecure about the value they bring. &nbsp;</p>
<h4>Do your background checks</h4>
<p>What&rsquo;s your new manager&rsquo;s preferred style of working, and of interacting with their direct reports? How can you work best with your team? What does excellent performance look like in your role? What&rsquo;s the work culture? What&rsquo;s the social media policy? Is there a standardised LinkedIn protocol for employees? These are useful questions you can ask in your last interview (if things are looking good), when you know you&rsquo;ve got the job, or in your first week.</p>
<h4>Work on your brand</h4>
<p>It&rsquo;s all too easy to create an impression and rather more difficult to change it. So when you&rsquo;re chatting to your new peers, be mindful of how you talk about other people or a previous role - regardless of why and how you left it! If asked, find the positives in even the most difficult experiences.</p>
<h3>Laying foundations</h3>
<h4>Take those questions you asked and plan accordingly</h4>
<p>If you&rsquo;ve asked about what great performance in the role looks like, now&rsquo;s the time to start putting that into practice. Perhaps in interview you asked what the previous incumbent of the role could have done better (if there was one). If so, you can start to set yourself up to do precisely this.</p>
<p>It might be that your predecessor didn&rsquo;t interact with the accounts department enough, or include the NPD team in their communications when they should have. This kind of feedback is often a useful giveaway about the important elements of a job.</p>
<p>So if you hear that your predecessor didn&rsquo;t have a great relationship with the quality department but needed to, that&rsquo;s one relationship I&rsquo;d be looking to build early on.</p>
<h4>Tackle the thorny issues</h4>
<p>Find out what your manager&rsquo;s/the department&rsquo;s/the business&rsquo;s big challenges are and start to figure out what role you might play in addressing them. Don&rsquo;t do this at the risk of neglecting your core accountabilities and responsibilities, which should come first. But be mindful of the bigger picture and the part you can play in it.</p>
<h4>Build your network</h4>
<p>Identify, meet and nurture your key stakeholder relationships from the get-go: I&rsquo;d suggest you spend your first couple of weeks meeting or talking with all of your key contacts and influencers, seeking to understand their challenges. If your employer is small enough, I&rsquo;d suggest simply meeting as many people as you can so everyone knows who you are.</p>
<p>Similarly, it&rsquo;s a great idea to find a few allies at this time &ndash; people at work with whom you get along naturally, and peers of a similar level who might, in future, relate to your challenges and offer useful support or endorsement.</p>
<p>If it helps, you can (roughly) script an introduction &ndash; an overview of who you are, your experience, what you&rsquo;ve been hired to do and why you&rsquo;re excited to be in your new role. It&rsquo;ll help for the inevitable round of new introductions and meetings that will be a part of your first weeks and months.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve already alluded to this but it&rsquo;s worth elaborating: it&rsquo;s really important that you also build great relationships with your team, direct reports and manager at this time, understanding how each likes to work and communicating clearly about how you like to. Now&rsquo;s the time to understand your manager&rsquo;s priorities for you and what success looks like for them.</p>
<h4>Establish reporting/reviewing protocols and action them</h4>
<p>Build some time into your first three months to review your team (if you&rsquo;re a manager) and have a review with your own manager so that you know where you stand with them and vice versa. Your own review will provide a useful check that your manager&rsquo;s feelings about your performance so far match up to your own, and if not, what you need to do about it. And if you&rsquo;re managing others, it&rsquo;s a useful way to build rapport and clarify your own expectations of them.</p>
<h4>Set some boundaries</h4>
<p>Your key stakeholders and peers will want as much of you as they can get. So make sure you establish boundaries about what they can and cannot expect from you.</p>

How to get a great start in a new job

<h5>As Autumn approaches, many employers are embarking are one of the busiest times of the hiring season, which means a lot of people reading this could be about to sit interviews, facing questions of varying complexity.&nbsp;</h5>
<p>Some interview questions are straightforward, requiring only a simple, factual answer.</p>
<p>Others are more complex and designed to achieve several things at once.</p>
<p>The key to answering complex interview questions well is in understanding their purpose. If you understand&nbsp;<em>why&nbsp;</em>you&rsquo;re being asked a particular type of question, you can provide a better answer. So let&rsquo;s take a look at some of the types of questioning you&rsquo;re likely to face, and what your interviewer is seeking to learn about you in each case.</p>
<h3>Question types</h3>
<p>The most commonly-encountered types of interview questions are competency, situational and behavioural questions. There is considerable overlap and blurring between these, but they generally work as follows:</p>
<ol>
<li>Competency questions are used to assess how you have previously deployed specific skills and competencies deemed important in the context of the role you&rsquo;re interviewing for. &nbsp;They encourage evidence-based answers from your own experience.</li>
<li>Situational questions test your approach to a purely hypothetical scenario, normally a problematic or challenging one. They require you to apply problem-solving logic to a situation you may have never faced, and can reveal a lot about how you think under pressure, or the processes you apply.</li>
<li>Behavioural questions are all about how you have approached challenging situations in the past and are designed to test your behaviours, attitude and ability to learn from experience. They are very similar to competency questions, just more focused on behaviours rather than skills. Some questions can be a mix of both, but the techniques used to answer them are the same.</li>
</ol>
<p>All of these question types are designed to assess not only the content of your answer, but&nbsp;<em>how&nbsp;</em>you answer. They can reveal a lot about your resourcefulness, imagination, emotional intelligence, ability to reflect, how well you organise your thoughts and your communication skills. They test your ability to think on your feet too, because you&rsquo;ll have to do that with all of them!</p>
<h4>How to answer these questions</h4>
<p>A renowned method for structuring responses to these questions is the STAR technique, which comprises four steps:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Situation</strong>: Describe the situation in which the event took place.</li>
<li><strong>Task</strong>: Describe the task/issue/challenge/problem you had to complete/resolve. &nbsp;</li>
<li><strong>Action</strong>: Describe the action you took to achieve this.</li>
<li><strong>Results</strong>: Describe the results of your actions, emphasising any resulting success or changes.</li>
</ul>
<p>You can apply this approach, with tweaks as appropriate, to all the above question types.</p>
<h3>A typical answer to a question, using the STAR framework:</h3>
<p><em>Question: Tell me about a time when you proactively sought to provide a solution to a customer issue.</em></p>
<p><em>Answer: In my role as a Customer Account Manager for MyTelco Limited, I inherited a major account. My client, the ICT manager, was really unhappy about the service she had received and was on the verge of changing suppliers. I arranged to visit her and asked her to explain why she was dissatisfied with the service. It turned out that each of the four technical departments involved in servicing her account never talked to one another and that she was getting different, often conflicting messages from different teams, who had been contacting her directly. She didn&rsquo;t know who to believe, and lost all faith that her issues would be addressed.&nbsp;</em></p>
<p><em>I listened to her problems and explained that it would be a priority for me to resolve them as soon as possible. Within three days I had spoken to all of the technical support teams, got an accurate picture of the historical and current situation with her account and took sole charge of communicating with her. I ensured all future communication would come through me once I was fully informed about any and all issues from each of the teams.</em></p>
<p><em>My client was pleased with the improvement in the service and despite the fact that I couldn&rsquo;t always ensure issues were resolved immediately, I was always careful to set her expectations, be the sole source of communication (with contingency plans for any absence) and provide consistent and regular updates on any issues. As such, she always knew where she was and my relationship with her was excellent. The account was treated as a churning account; nobody expected me to win it back, but I successfully retained it.</em></p>
<h3>Common mistakes to avoid with these questions</h3>
<p>When interviewers ask these questions, they want to see evidence of skills and expertise that&nbsp;<em>you&nbsp;</em>have applied. They&rsquo;re looking for evidence of what you can do as an individual. So make your answer about what you did, not what the team you worked for did.</p>
<p>By all means briefly outline the wider context, but make sure your example is specifically chosen to illustrate what you accomplished: what did you do and why/how, and what difference did it make?</p>
<p>Now let&rsquo;s look at these question types in more depth.</p>
<h3>Competency-based questions</h3>
<p>A popular form of questioning designed to ascertain your competence in key areas essential in the context of the role. Do you have the competence an interviewer is looking for? They will test you by asking you to reflect on situations where you&rsquo;ve applied them in the past.</p>
<h4>Examples</h4>
<p><em>Give me an example of when you used your management skills to motivate a peer or subordinate.</em></p>
<p><em>Tell me about a time when you took responsibility for a project.</em></p>
<p><em>Tell me about a time when you implemented something new.</em></p>
<h3>Situational questions</h3>
<p>Situational questions are designed to test your responses to hypothetical, often pressurised scenarios. You&rsquo;ll need to think fast, imagining yourself in a scenario you may not have experienced before.</p>
<p>Scenario-based questions are designed to prevent you from giving a pre-scripted response. It&rsquo;s hard to prepare an answer, but you can prepare the method you&rsquo;ll use to provide an answer: as with competency and behavioural questions, use STAR to describe the situation. But this time, you&rsquo;re talking about a problem or challenge instead of a task, as mentioned above. You can still go on to describe the actions you&rsquo;ll take.&nbsp;</p>
<h4>Examples</h4>
<p><em>If someone makes an error and you&rsquo;re the only one who has spotted it, what would you do?</em></p>
<p><em>How would you handle a member of your team who was failing?</em></p>
<p><em>If you got the job, what would you do in your first three months here? (A challenge, not a problem!)</em></p>
<h3>Behavioural questions</h3>
<p>Like the very similar competency questions, these questions are based on the idea that how you worked in the past is a good signifier of how you&rsquo;ll work in the future. They are often about how you approached a challenging scenario, so your interviewer can get a sense of how you might do that when you work for them.</p>
<h4>Examples</h4>
<p><em>Describe a situation when you had to persuade your manager that you were right and they were wrong.</em></p>
<p><em>Describe a situation where you had to win over an angry client.</em></p>
<p><em>Describe a situation where you had to motivate a failing employee.</em></p>
<h3>Learning from mistakes</h3>
<p>Some competency or behavioural questions might invite you to reflect on your own mistakes. You could face questions such as this:</p>
<p><em>Tell me about an experience that made you change the way you manage customers, and how you changed</em></p>
<p>Or</p>
<p><em>What&rsquo;s the hardest lesson you&rsquo;ve had to learn?</em></p>
<p>Questions like these are a good opportunity to show your ability to learn from experience. For leadership roles in particular it&rsquo;s interesting for interviewers to see whether candidates can reflect on mistakes of the past, which takes emotional intelligence and a bit of humility. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>Furthermore, conversations about learning from &ldquo;failure&rdquo; bring a human element to interviews, creating a safe space where people can talk about mistakes without feeling judged. It&rsquo;s a great technique for seeing the person behind the professional, slick exterior.&nbsp;</p>
<h3>Other questions you can expect</h3>
<h4>Curveball questions/brain teasers</h4>
<p>These can vary enormously from the famed and so-called &ldquo;Google Questions&rdquo; asking you to explain how you&rsquo;d work out how many tennis balls you can fit into a swimming pool, to what colour you would be, and why! Though challenging, they aren&rsquo;t standard for most employers and even when they are asked they&rsquo;re more about understanding your thought process than providing a &ldquo;correct&rdquo; answer. Some of the more off-the-wall questions are just a bit of fun and a useful ice-breaker.</p>
<h4>Talk me through your CV/give me a summary of your career to date</h4>
<p>You&rsquo;re likely to be asked to deliver a summary of your employment history. This is a great opportunity to shine, and here&rsquo;s how: rehearse. Practise delivering a smooth, concise history of your career. If you&rsquo;ve made all your career decisions consciously to contribute to your overall value in a specific skill area, you&rsquo;ll have a great story to tell. But if your career has been fairly random, sit down with your CV and find the common threads and the narrative within it so that you can present a logical progression.</p>
<h3>Quick tips to ensure you don&rsquo;t get caught out by interview questions</h3>
<ul>
<li>Do your research on the company, its markets and products or services.</li>
<li>Prepare well for when it&rsquo;s your time to ask questions. Go into your interview armed with strong questions that show you&rsquo;re really interested in the job and have done your research.</li>
<li>Ask for clarification if you don&rsquo;t understand a question.</li>
<li>If you&rsquo;re really stumped by a question, repeat it out loud or say &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a challenging question, I&rsquo;ll have to think about that&hellip;&rdquo; rather than sitting in silence. It will buy you thinking time.</li>
<li>Go into each interview with a positive mind-set. See interviews as an opportunity: your best-ever job could be just an interview away!</li>
</ul>

A beginner's guide to decoding interview questions

<h5>When talking to you, our lovely candidates, we probably get more questions about CVs than anything else. So we thought we&rsquo;d share our advice more widely and provide a couple of example templates as a general guide. (Many more are available on the web).</h5>
<p>As a general rule, less is more when it comes to CVs, so producing an effective document isn&rsquo;t beyond anyone. Moreover, it&rsquo;s easy to eliminate the mistakes we commonly see.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p>
<p>Every hiring manager has their own opinion as to what constitutes a great CV, so it&rsquo;s impossible to give definitive advice to cover every scenario. What I can do is provide some general truisms based on my experience, and that&rsquo;s what you&rsquo;ll find here.</p>
<p>Having got that out of the way, let&rsquo;s make like a CV and get to the point.</p>
<h3>How to think about a CV</h3>
<p>A CV has one job: to sell you enough to get you through the door to an interview, where you can do the rest. Your CV will most likely end up in a pile (digital or physical) and will be skim-read first time round to determine whether it warrants closer reading.</p>
<p>So your CV needs to cut to the chase and sell you, fast. A fussy or complicated-looking CV will force a reader to work too hard. Nothing in a CV should get in the way of the reader&rsquo;s understanding, and every choice you make should facilitate this. That applies to layout, order, typeface and language.</p>
<h3>Length</h3>
<p>Keep your CV to no more than two pages (two sides). Some people argue that if your experience warrants more space, use it, but many of the most senior and accomplished professionals I know manage to keep theirs to two pages. Communicating concisely is a skill, and one the best professionals have often mastered. If two sides is good enough for them, it&rsquo;s good enough for anyone.</p>
<h3>Example CV templates</h3>
<p>You can view and download some examples of sensible, effective layouts here at the links below. We made the first two. These are only an approximate guide only, designed to illustrate in simple terms the things we&rsquo;d encourage you to think about.</p>
<p><strong>Example 1:&nbsp;<a href="http://oliver-dev.s3.amazonaws.com/2019/08/28/12/38/55/9/CV%20Example%201%20-%20Marketing%20Manager.docx" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-cke-saved-href="http://oliver-dev.s3.amazonaws.com/2019/08/28/12/38/55/9/CV Example 1 - Marketing Manager.docx">CV for a fictional Marketing Manager</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Example 2:&nbsp;<a href="https://oliver-dev.s3.amazonaws.com/2019/08/28/12/39/30/952/CV%20Example%202%20-%20Senior%20HR%20professional.docx" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-cke-saved-href="https://oliver-dev.s3.amazonaws.com/2019/08/28/12/39/30/952/CV%20Example%202%20-%20Senior%20HR%20professional.docx">CV for a fictional Senior HR professional, with alternative layout</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.totaljobs.com/advice/cv-templates" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-cke-saved-href="https://www.totaljobs.com/advice/cv-templates">Here's a few more you may like, from Total Jobs</a>, for different scenarios.</p>
<p>Now let&rsquo;s have a more in-depth discussion about each section of a CV.</p>
<h3>Layout</h3>
<p>A CV&rsquo;s layout should be chosen entirely to make it as easy as possible to read. Use simple, non-serif, attractive fonts, headings, lines and bullets to help the reader work through your CV. But don&rsquo;t aim for &ldquo;fancy&rdquo;: avoid swirls, swishes or elaborate graphical elements.</p>
<p>I would recommend creating your CV as a simple Word document. Many firms use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to automatically analyse CVs for keywords before sorting, filing or prioritising them. These types of software generally process simple Word documents best.</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s the structure I suggest you follow:</p>
<h4>1. Contact details</h4>
<p>Keep it simple. Have your name, contact details and address (if you wish) central and neat, with your name in larger font than the rest. Follow with&hellip;</p>
<h4>2. The Personal Statement or Profile</h4>
<p>Your personal statement or profile can be a few lines long. It&rsquo;s a very concise summary of what you can offer and why someone should hire you. It&rsquo;s your elevator pitch where you mention your unique selling points: the combination of skills, qualities, strengths and the overall &ldquo;theme&rdquo; of your combined achievements that make you great!</p>
<p>For example, are you someone who has consistently proven that you can motivate and transform underperforming teams? Do you have a history of identifying and removing factors that are a barrier to success? Are you able to turn complex ideas into working policy? Have you helped develop and launch successful brands? (And will what comes next in your CV evidence any of this?)</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s a reminder of a personal statement in one of our template CVs.</p>
<h4>3. The Employment History or Career History</h4>
<p>Next, list your employment history chronologically, as shown in our templates, with the&nbsp;<em>most recent role at the top</em>. Quite a lot of people have this the wrong way round, with their current job at the end of the career history section. Your recent roles are the most relevant and reflect who you are today, so they go at the top!</p>
<p>Your recent experience should also be the most detailed, with successively less detail the further back you go.</p>
<p>If you have a lot of experience, you may need to make decisions about how far back to go in your work history. Experienced professionals often summarise their early career in a short paragraph or using bullets showing job titles and dates only (i.e. no detail).</p>
<p>Alternatively, you could simply go back only as far as your career history becomes particularly relevant and persuasive, provided you still give enough detail to give a sense of your career journey. If in doubt, ask us!</p>
<p>The key to a good CV is relevance &ndash; cite the most relevant and compelling experience and achievements for the role you&rsquo;re applying for.&nbsp;</p>
<h4>4. Achievements versus responsibilities</h4>
<p>Many people spend valuable space listing their responsibilities for each role. It&rsquo;s a common mistake. Outline responsibilities briefly, before detailing key achievements in well-written and totally original (i.e. unique to you) bulleted sentences. Achievements are more important and persuasive than responsibilities but they don&rsquo;t all have to be numbers- and ROI-based. Different roles allow for different achievements. Think about where and how you have made a difference to teams, people, culture, vision, product launches, reputation, processes, time-saving and so on - as well as more obvious results like sales, revenue, margin and cost-savings.</p>
<h4>5. Education/qualifications/training</h4>
<p>It&rsquo;s okay to have all these in one section towards the end of your CV. Keep it brief, neat, relevant and to the point. For many roles (including science/tech/engineering) it can be useful to cite final-year projects, placements or competitions entered or won, provided they are relevant and fulfil the all-important objective of selling you.</p>
<h4>6. Optional: Skills summaries</h4>
<p>As an alternative to listing education and training/qualifications together, a concise list of relevant technical skills at the end of a CV is fine. It&rsquo;s generally most associated with technical and IT skills, less so for soft skills that can feature in your personal statement or referenced in your career history. Having said that, lists of soft skills at the end of a CV can work, especially where they demonstrably allowed an individual to make a difference, and are crucial to the role.</p>
<h4>7. Optional: Hobbies &amp; interests</h4>
<p>There is debate about whether or not to include hobbies at the end of a CV. My take on it is this: a CV is a selling document, so include content that sells you. Quite a few hiring managers I know look for experience outside of work that dovetails with a person&rsquo;s chosen profession, such as evidence they enjoy spending time in teams, managing clubs, volunteering or pushing their limits. If your interest sell you in a way that&rsquo;s relevant, include it. But exclude irrelevant information on the same grounds.</p>
<h4>8. Dos and don&rsquo;ts &ndash; a roundup</h4>
<p><strong>Do</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Have your name and&nbsp;<em>personal&nbsp;</em>contact details front and centre.</li>
<li>Use a combination of headings/bold/underlining/bullets/spacing to create a simple, neat document that&rsquo;s easy to read.</li>
<li>Keep your CV short and relevant &ndash; 2 sides is perfect.</li>
<li>Have a strong summary/profile section.</li>
<li>Ensure your CV matches your LinkedIn profile.</li>
<li>Proof your CV carefully, or ask someone else to.</li>
<li>Ensure your CV contains keywords associated with your profession, while avoiding death-by-jargon in your career history.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Don&rsquo;t</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Include a photo. A photo always makes a CV look messier, no matter how professionally-presented it is. It also invites unconscious bias.</li>
<li>Use graphics such as pie charts or graphs to illustrate your achievements or anything else. Unless you happen to know that graphics are the norm for the role you&rsquo;re applying for, keep layout very simple.</li>
<li>Have any unaccounted-for gaps in your experience.<br><br></li>
</ul>
<h4>9. Advanced CV writing: finding your career story</h4>
<p>Every career can be presented as a kind of story, showing how the choices you made from your education onwards all helped you move towards your preferred career, and how you chose to refine and hone your skills through training, deliberate sideways career moves and so on. Perhaps you chose to work with an employer because you knew they would provide a specific experience or skillset you were looking for.</p>
<p>Find the narrative in your career: what&rsquo;s the common theme that links your roles? What&rsquo;s the story of your development and how you&rsquo;ve shaped your career? How do your qualities, skills and experience all come together to produce the professional you are? It&rsquo;s a good idea to talk through this with a friend or mentor if you can.</p>
<h4>10. Exceptions to the rule/s</h4>
<p>All of this is only general advice, so break any of my &ldquo;rules&rdquo; if you&rsquo;re confident you know better! To a point, every industry has its own rules and codes. For example, while CVs are generally best kept very simple in layout, a graphic designer might have some leeway to get creative with that simplicity &ndash; provided their creativity doesn&rsquo;t get in the way of the reader&rsquo;s understanding. Always exercise your own best judgement and research typical CVs for your industry or job function if in doubt. The templates we have provided are very simple, but by all means come up with alternative versions.</p>
<h3>Keeping a record</h3>
<p>One final piece of advice: keep updating your CV as you go, or make a note of your key achievements in a file, whether that&rsquo;s a word document, notebook or spreadsheet. When you next need to update your CV, you&rsquo;ll be glad you did this.</p>
<p>Don&rsquo;t forget to get in touch if you have any questions.</p>
<p>- Nick</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>*I&rsquo;d like thank Gareth Wyn Jones for his input into this piece. &nbsp;Greatly appreciated, Gareth.</p>

How to write a great CV

<h2>Part 2 of our Formula One career guide</h2>
<h5>Welcome to the second part of our blog about working in F1. We&rsquo;ve already seen that F1 is an exciting, prestigious and challenging career (missed part 1?&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gerrellandhard.co.uk/blog/2019/06/how-to-get-into-formula-one-a-career-guide?source=google.com">Read it here</a>).</h5>
<p>This time, it&rsquo;s over to two of our friends at Honda F1 Racing, Christopher Wright and George Warrington, who offer glimpses of trackside and factory-based life respectively.</p>
<p>Christopher is a Trackside Power Unit Performance Engineer, and George a factory-based Junior Mechanical design engineer, both at Honda Racing F1. Over to you, gents.</p>
<h3>What&rsquo;s the most popular misconception about working in F1?</h3>
<p><strong>Christopher</strong>: For me, it&rsquo;s that we spend all night looking at data. We do spend a long time analysing the data and finding areas to improve. But we also make time to have a beer and get some sleep!</p>
<p><strong>George</strong>: Probably that you need to know people on the inside to get into the industry. Good contacts help in any industry, but really it&rsquo;s down to your CV and how well you come across in an interview.</p>
<p>Another myth is that you work 24/7 all year round. We certainly have our peaks. I&rsquo;m especially busy during the winter but for much of the season it&rsquo;s a pretty normal working week like any industry. Overtime is perhaps more regular than in other industries but if you are in F1 you&rsquo;ll be passionate, and you don&rsquo;t notice it.</p>
<h3>How did you come to be in your role?</h3>
<p><strong>Christopher</strong>: I always watched motor racing with my Dad on Sundays (he usually fell asleep). I focussed on academia at school, then did my degree in Motorsports Engineering at UCLAN. On those types of degree courses it seems lots people want to become a Race Engineer after they graduate. I decided to pick an area that most see as a bit specialist and are scared of; I realised this might help me successfully secure an interesting job after university. I decided I should try to specialise in dampers, electronics or engines. I picked engines and haven&rsquo;t looked back! I&rsquo;ve been in the industry now since 2005. I started with motorcycle tuning, then went endurance racing with sports prototypes before moving into F1.</p>
<p><strong>George</strong>: I came into my role through a standard A level and university route: I went to the University of Wales Trinity Saint David Swansea, took an HND in Motorsport Engineering on the BSc course and after completing that in two years, took a one-year placement for Force India in the engineering and control department. Then I returned to university where I transferred onto a Bachelors of Engineering course specialising in Motorsport Engineering and Design, which I spent a further two years studying.</p>
<p>My experiences further inspired my passion for F1 and while studying, I also worked with the Formula Renault team in the Monoposto championship, which allowed me to put my skills into practice and go racing &ndash; I learned loads doing this. Towards the end of my time at university I got in touch with some recruitment agencies. Paul Frisby at Gerrell &amp; Hard talked to me a lot, and recommended me for my role. And here I am!</p>
<h3>Was there an obvious &ldquo;moment&rdquo; that led to your career in F1?</h3>
<p><strong>Christopher</strong>: No, it was a culmination of interest and education which led me here. I didn't ever expect to be working in F1, I just wanted to do something interesting and get as much experience as possible. Looking back it was almost inevitable that I would want to be working in F1 but I'm glad that it wasn't a target I set for myself.</p>
<p><strong>George</strong>: It was only when I looked for university courses that I discovered F1 was a career path that I might be able to take. I was always interested in cars and motorsport, but at school I struggled with maths and thought F1 was too lofty for me to access. But when a friend told me about the motorsport degree course I realised I could do it. I was initially considering boat design. From my time at university, everything I have done is about being the best engineer I could possibly be. Coming out of university I had an end goal in sight: getting into F1. To have done so is a great feeling.</p>
<h3>What do you most enjoy about your job?</h3>
<p><strong>Christopher</strong>: I like having a direct beneficial impact on the operation and performance of Alex&rsquo;s (Toro Rosso driver Alex Albon) car. When it all comes together and we get a good result as a team, it makes me very happy to know that I did a good job and contributed to that success.</p>
<p><strong>George</strong>: I enjoy everything - I like working in the top echelons of the sport at the forefront of innovation, and I enjoy being part of a team. It takes a whole raft of designers and engineers with incredible talent and skills to make a car competitive, and I just try to learn as much as I can.</p>
<p>To an engineer, the challenges of F1 are what drives you. We&rsquo;re looking at the latest technology, working with really smart people, at a pace that&rsquo;s exciting. It&rsquo;s a privilege to work on some of the most high-tech projects around. I design energy storage systems so I get to see the packs fully built and operational. When you see the work you put in during pre-season testing it&rsquo;s a welcome sign when everything goes to plan. But when you actually qualify it&rsquo;s amazing &ndash; the job satisfaction is massive.&nbsp;</p>
<h3>What are the challenges of your job?</h3>
<p><strong>Christopher</strong>: Prioritisation and decision making. I have a lot of factors to take into account when trying to optimise the performance of the Power Unit. Lots of different conditions and parameters can affect the car performance. To be good at this job you have to know which are the most important areas and prioritise those. This comes with experience.</p>
<p><strong>George</strong>: F1 is so complex that the big challenge is making all the different elements of the car work together. This is technically demanding. Every team wants the highest power, lowest weight and smallest volume and that&rsquo;s what the teams are after from an engine supplier. Our big technical challenge is making it work, and there&rsquo;s a classic engineering challenge right there, of trying to find a solution.</p>
<p>That&rsquo;s a fantastic insight into F1 from two industry insiders, so a huge thank you to Christopher and George, and to Honda Racing F1, for their kind participation in this article.</p>
<p>If you have any questions about this blog or Formula 1 careers, please get in touch with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gerrellandhard.co.uk/consultants/nick-gerrell?source=google.com">Nick Gerrell</a>.</p>

The inside track on F1 careers

<h2>Part 1: An overview from a recruiter, by Nick Gerrell</h2>
<h5><strong>Formula One</strong>. For many, the name alone will produce a frisson of excitement. The world&rsquo;s most elite motorsport clearly thrills us with its glamour, competitiveness and excitement: last year, it boasted a global cumulative audience of over 1.7 billion.</h5>
<p>But what is F1 like to work in as an engineer, and what do you need to know if you harbour ambitions to break into the industry? Over the next two blogs we&rsquo;ll do our best to answer these questions.</p>
<p>In part one, I will write from my experience as a recruiter who has spoken to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of factory and trackside staff at all levels in F1. And in part two, coming soon, we&rsquo;re thrilled to be able to provide an insight from the heart of the industry when we hear from two engineers at Honda F1 Racing itself. Huge thanks to the team and the guys themselves for their kindness.</p>
<p>So without further ado, the lights are out, let&rsquo;s go!</p>
<h3>What are F1 engineering careers like? Why are they so sought after?&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>
<p>I admit I&rsquo;m a bit partial, but many, many people want to work in F1 because it is quite simply the pinnacle of automotive engineering and, of course, racing. It&rsquo;s a passion for a lot of people too. So for an engineer to be able to push themselves to the pinnacle of their profession while being involved in their passion &ndash; that&rsquo;s a pretty big draw.</p>
<h3>What are the popular misconceptions about F1 careers?</h3>
<p>I suppose some people might assume that F1 is always glamorous, but perhaps not: even the casual viewer can&rsquo;t fail to recognise the obvious hard work behind it. The extraordinary competition of F1 creates an ongoing arms race, which means the people in the industry work very hard, while it&rsquo;s also difficult for the smaller teams to level the playing field.</p>
<p>So yes, F1 has its glamorous side that you see on TV: the bucket-list locations, the travel, the champagne lifestyle and the PR buzz. But it is hard, intense work over a long season with races across the world. It&rsquo;s amazing but it can be gruelling. Depending on your role, jetlag, tough days and stress could be your bedfellows &ndash; but if you work in F1 you&rsquo;ll be passionate about it, so it will be part of the job, and you will love it.</p>
<h3>Is it hard to get into?</h3>
<p>Of course it is. It&rsquo;s hard because of the sheer numbers that want to do it and because you&rsquo;ve got to be really good to get your foot in the door. The teams work to strict budgets so are very selective.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>The global appeal of F1 means the talent pool is massive, which makes it even more competitive. It also means the teams are often multinational; F1 is one of the most diverse industries I&rsquo;ve seen.</p>
<h3>What qualities do you need to work in F1?</h3>
<p>You need to be hard-working, tenacious and resilient, and to have a positive mind-set. Above all you need to have a passion for F1. Trackside professionals within the industry talk of the &ldquo;travelling circus&rdquo; &ndash; they descend on a city, have a few days there then pack up and move on to the next destination. They have to be resilient and mobile. But whether you&rsquo;re trackside or factory-based, you&rsquo;ll need a lot of the same qualities because F1 has cycles of intense activity and effort wherever you are based.</p>
<h3>What&rsquo;s the &ldquo;typical&rdquo; route into F1?</h3>
<p>For engineers within F1, there are two pretty well-defined spheres, each offering many different roles, responsibilities and duties requiring a broad range of skills.</p>
<p>There are the technical factory-based roles - the designers and analysis engineers who don&rsquo;t travel but develop and design the vehicles.</p>
<p>Then there are the track-based engineers who are more mechanical and hands-on with the cars. They are reactive and keep the cars ticking over.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>There are various routes into F1 for these professionals. Successful graduates or postgraduates with really strong engineering principles will normally be in the top percentile of their degree and may have a Masters or PhD in a technical field. They are often hired in graduate intake schemes when F1 companies are recruiting the cream of the crop.</p>
<p>Their passion for the industry means they won&rsquo;t have to be asked to go the extra mile; these people are often already living and breathing F1 as far as their life allows them to, such as by participating in Formula Student and so on.</p>
<p>In the same way that footballers can begin their career in lower leagues and work their way to the top, some engineers begin in other forms of motorsport such as endurance racing, rallies and F2 and work their way into F1.</p>
<h3>Is it all about who you know?</h3>
<p>A good network is valuable in any industry and I recommend that anyone in any industry today will only benefit from a great network. So sure, it helps &ndash; but it&rsquo;s absolutely not the be-all, end-all. For many graduates or postgraduates looking to enter F1 as engineers, a great degree, additional experience and passion are the key.</p>
<p><img src="https://d3jh33bzyw1wep.cloudfront.net/s3/W1siZiIsIjIwMTkvMDYvMDQvMTUvMjkvNTIvNzM5L3BhdHJpY2stcm9iZXJ0LWRveWxlLTE0NDQyMzItdW5zcGxhc2hfc21sLmpwZyJdXQ"></p>
<h3>Core F1 roles</h3>
<p>If you think about an OEM (original equipment manufacturer &ndash; any company that produces parts and equipment, sometimes to be marketed by another manufacturer) then F1 is like that but with shorter lead times. F1 products need to be developed to pressurised timescales. Instead of warranty and durability, the emphasis is on speed, aerodynamics and performance. Otherwise, the same skillsets apply across &ldquo;standard&rdquo; OEMs and F1.</p>
<p>In technical, factory-based product development, that includes roles as diverse as design, analysis, testing, vehicle dynamics and so on. This is where the performance-related work happens across the whole vehicle. There&rsquo;s a lot of visionary thinking and innovation here.</p>
<p>Trackside engineers are incredibly practical, able to firefight, be reactive to a changing situation and understand and resolve problems in a flash. These teams have to do a lot of their work in the moment and are drilled for short turnaround times.</p>
<p>Many of the managerial and directorial trackside professionals come from factory-based roles, but this is not always the case.&nbsp;</p>
<h3>What qualifications do you need?</h3>
<p>With a broad number of specialist engineering roles available in F1, the key is relevance and quality. People often enter through excellent degrees, MSCs or PhDs in Mechanical engineering, electronics, dedicated university MSCs in Motorsport (such as the Cranfield University Advanced Motorsport MSc), aerodynamics and physics. Students with good mathematics degrees from elite universities, who also have modelling and analysis skills, can get in. A diverse range of degrees are considered relevant.</p>
<p>You don&rsquo;t absolutely have to have a degree to work in F1. Some professionals are more purely practical, apprentice-trained and enter the industry with experience in different forms of motorsport. There can be vacancies for CNC machinists and mechanics in F1 teams which don&rsquo;t require degrees. There are HNC apprentices who work their way up. It&rsquo;s a broad industry that makes space for a wide range of skills. But make no mistake: whatever you do, if you want to work in F1, you had better be good at it!</p>
<p>Of course, there&rsquo;s also a sizeable support function in each team: the operations people, the buyers, purchasing and supply chain, marketing, HR, IT and professionals. It&rsquo;s a complete industry in its own right that has room for most roles.</p>
<h3>What are the rewards of F1 careers?</h3>
<p>Working at the pinnacle of engineering, with lots of camaraderie, great team ethics, huge highs, a fast pace of work and life and, potentially, travel.</p>
<p>The pay is generally good, too, and needs to be: industry professionals work hard, and as teams come and go, an F1 job isn&rsquo;t perceived as a job for life.</p>
<h3>What are the challenges and tougher elements of the job?</h3>
<p>See above: those huge highs can have their corresponding lows. Getting into the industry is hard, and once you&rsquo;re in, it can be hard to remain there. F1 is demanding, as you&rsquo;d expect from an industry that hires the best and demands the best they have to give.</p>
<p><img src="https://d3jh33bzyw1wep.cloudfront.net/s3/W1siZiIsIjIwMTkvMDYvMDQvMTUvMzEvMzkvNjAzL3B1YmxpYy0xNjU1Nzc4XzE5MjBfc21sLmpwZyJdXQ"></p>
<h3>How do you get ahead in the industry?</h3>
<p>Be passionate, work hard and learn as much as you can. Easy!</p>
<p>If you&rsquo;re a graduate or engineer with dreams of working in F1, I&rsquo;d suggest you do all you can to get relevant extracurricular activities onto your CV. By all means reach out to the broad motorsport industry to find out how you can secure some work experience. But the best advice I can give you is to get involved in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.imeche.org/events/formula-student" target="_blank" rel="noopener">IMechE&rsquo;s annual Formula Student competition</a>.</p>
<p>Most people I&rsquo;ve met in F1 have been involved with Formula Student in some way. For the uninitiated, in very simple terms it&rsquo;s a like a mini F1 where teams of engineering students from all over the world compete to design and build their own car and race it. It&rsquo;s been helpful in bridging the learning gap between academic and practical engineering for students and in encouraging interest in engineering amongst young people.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<h3>You&rsquo;ll like a career in F1 if you are...</h3>
<p>Passionate about F1, hard-working, ambitious, independent but capable of being a team player, resilient.</p>
<h3>This job isn&rsquo;t for you if you are&hellip;</h3>
<p>If you&rsquo;re not desperately keen to work in the industry, you&rsquo;re unlikely to drift into it by mistake, so it&rsquo;s probably unnecessary to tell people why F1 might not be for them.</p>
<p>However, if you&rsquo;re a clock-watcher who doesn&rsquo;t welcome the prospect of travel (for some roles) or periods of intensity in your workload, or the possibility of big highs and lows, F1 is probably not for you! It&rsquo;s a fantastic career, and if you&rsquo;re right for F1 you will welcome both the challenges and rewards with open arms.</p>
<h5>Coming soon:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gerrellandhard.co.uk/blog/2019/06/the-inside-track-on-formula-one-careers">Part 2 - The inside track on F1 careers from two Honda Racing F1 engineers!</a>&nbsp;Don&rsquo;t miss it.</h5>
<p>If you have any questions about this blog or F1 careers, please get in touch with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gerrellandhard.co.uk/consultants/nick-gerrell">Nick Gerrell</a>.</p>

How to get into F1 - a career guide

<h5>Engineering needs a new voice. And the pop and TV star/actor/producer/entrepreneur/influencer is the perfect encapsulation of that voice, argues Joel Hard.</h5>
<p>Perhaps you don&rsquo;t know Will.i.am, but there&rsquo;s a pretty good chance your kids do. And that&rsquo;s important.</p>
<p>Perhaps you&nbsp;<em>do</em>&nbsp;know Will.i.am. Maybe you&rsquo;ve watched The Voice, the popular BBC show where a panel of established music industry judges select candidates to join their team based on blind auditions. They listen to voices, but don&rsquo;t see the singers. Unable to make any judgement beyond identifying the presence of potential in a contestant&rsquo;s voice, they are un-swayed by race, gender, sexual identity, class or contemporary notions of attractiveness. In the early stages at least, the show is an experiment in minimising bias, albeit a light-hearted one.</p>
<p>For anyone still none the wiser, Will.i.am is a musician, rapper, actor, producer and director. But wait &ndash; I&rsquo;ve barely started. He&rsquo;s also an entrepreneur, an innovator and a visionary. He&rsquo;s described by Engineering and Technology Magazine as &ldquo;an innovation consultant with a passion for merging the worlds of technology and design,&rdquo; and his business CV would make the most precocious millennial entrepreneur proud. His multi-faceted portfolio career is the quintessence of 21st Century success.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>But best of all, he is an advocate for education - no mere cheerleader for empowerment through education, but an agent of it. His i.am.angel Foundation provides support via charities to people in underserved communities, helping the young to transform their lives through scholarships, college preparation and access to opportunities in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics. Part of his message to his massive audience (he has over 13 million followers on Twitter alone) is about the opportunities these subjects can create for the young, and part of it is about empowerment &ndash; not just the importance of education, but the idea of being the change you seek.</p>
<p>Last year, he was rewarded with an Honorary Fellowship from the IET for his outstanding contribution to the engineering profession, and rightly so.</p>
<p>I have huge respect for Will.i.am and his work facilitating young engineering careers. And I am fascinated by the way he understands just how to influence future generations and inspire their interest in technology careers. For me this is something that is still being missed by many organisations who struggle to combat an old problem - the need for more engineers - using old-fashioned methods, arguments and appeals to economic imperatives.</p>
<p>The years before students choose their options are the years when you can really inspire them about their future careers. Will.i.am thinks engineering is cool. He shares that belief with anyone who will listen to him. Perhaps engineering needs social influencers who can rebrand it. Perhaps it needs new voices. &nbsp;</p>
<p>A lot of businesses are doing very good work trying to broaden the appeal of engineering. But applicants for college courses are still overwhelmingly male. The ratio of male to female students in my son&rsquo;s engineering course at college was 30:2.</p>
<p>I doubt even Elon Musk, the rock-star of engineers, could persuade my twelve-year-old daughter that engineering is a great career choice. But an influencer with a more crossover appeal &ndash; someone who speaks to the worlds that occupy the young &ndash; fashion, music and design &ndash; probably could.</p>
<p>What does Will.i.am do that works so well? He yolks STEM subjects and education itself to ideas about social change and empowerment. His message to young people is not just to get into education, but also to build your own business, become a giver, make a difference &ndash; something that is part of the millennial agenda.</p>
<p>To quote the man himself,&nbsp;<a href="https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2017/11/william-honoured-by-the-iet-for-his-outstanding-contribution-to-the-engineering-profession/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">on receiving his IET award</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;I always tell the young kids that I come across: aim your dreams down a path of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics to not only fill jobs but create jobs. Surround yourself with other engineers and aim to be a part of the club that is out there solving the world&rsquo;s problems...&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think Will.i.am does two things for the STEM agenda that social influencers can do, and a lot of engineering brands cannot: 1) Make it seem cool and 2) Make it part of a broader lifestyle choice.</p>
<p>The way things become on-trend has changed. In recent years we&rsquo;ve seen an explosion of health and fitness influencers &ndash; people whose every workout routine or healthy meal is lapped up by millions of followers who share their gurus&rsquo; recipes, routines and motivational advice. Today, millions of Instagram posts, tweets and Facebook shares show off regular people&rsquo;s post-workout breakfast, 10K route, kettlebell workout and Tough-Mudder photos. People follow James Haskell, Chloe Madeley or Joe Wicks but they also participate in the conversation, and so do their friends.</p>
<p>STEM industries should look at how healthy lifestyles have been promoted with huge success by people who have been able to tap into the zeitgeist. They should learn from how celebrity endorsement has facilitated the healthy lifestyle trend, and use it to encourage young people (especially girls) into STEM. And the rewards must be trumpeted too &ndash; not just the opportunities for social change, but the day-to-day pleasures of working in cutting edge and vibrant environments.</p>
<p>For too long, engineering in the UK has languished in the doldrums, shackled with a reputation as a poor man&rsquo;s (yes) career choice. In the US and parts of Europe, this is an archaic perception, or one that never existed at all.&nbsp;</p>
<p>When I was a young person, the UK jobs with allure and credibility were doctor, surgeon, solicitor, perhaps city trader and high-ranking academic. But never an engineer. As an engineer, my father didn&rsquo;t get the respect he deserved from society. Neither did his profession. But engineers are the people who change the way we live. Every day, almost everything we do involves something invented or made by engineers. Without them, we are nothing.</p>
<p>Today, firms like McLaren Applied Technology, Castrol InnoVentures, Dyson and many more are rivalling the social media giants of Silicon Valley with their vibrant workplaces. The best engineering firms are hotbeds of innovation, with modern working environments: greenery, onsite gyms, the latest technology, and as much daylight as you&rsquo;d get in your local park. And aptly so, because the future is bright for those with a good degree in engineering. Perhaps we just need a few stars to light the way.</p>

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