Regional Talent & Innovative Culture Transformed Auto Trader UK

Wouldn’t you love work for a company that values your contribution? Or, work for a brand that has become a trend-setting institution? That’s the dream, but what’s it like actually working for a company like that? Take Auto Trader UK, the digital business that has become synonymous with buying and selling vehicles, where employees are extremely happy. With an overall Glassdoor company rating of 4.7/5, Culture and Values rating of 4.7/5 and a very high 97% of staff saying they’d recommend the company to a friend, this is somewhere that needs to be seriously considered when job hunting. To find out more, AutoTrader’s UK CEO, Trevor Mather, spoke exclusively with Glassdoor about travelling, recruiting in Manchester and transitioning a traditionally print-based business over to online in the North West. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and previous roles? I’m a proud Northerner, born and bred in St Helens and then Leyland and now living in Cheshire, albeit that I’ve been heavily influenced by 20+ years of being a global traveller. After getting a Masters in something as bizarre as Aeronautics and Astronautics from Southampton, I decided that Engineering was not a career for me, so joined Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) to gain an amazing grounding in business, helping predominantly the UK Government and Banks take advantage of technology.  After ten years, I jumped straight into the dotcom boom, where I, like many others closed down as many start-ups as I joined/started before I found my next longer term home. That was  ThoughtWorks, which at the time was a two hundred people strong US business focused on bringing technology solutions to the leasing industry.  I had the privilege to build their UK business and later become the global CEO, overseeing growth to 3,000+ people across 36 cities around the world, helping some of the best-known companies build better technology and digital solutions. Most importantly I also helped develop a culture where the employees truly cared about each other, about ThoughtWorks, about their customers, about the industry they were part of and about society at large.   I joined Auto Trader four years ago, partially because after travelling around the world it was great to work for an UK company based in the North West of England (Manchester), but mainly because it was at the time (already) an incredible business with huge potential to completely transform an industry and make a difference to UK consumers.  I’ve had the opportunity to take many of the best bits that I have seen from fantastic companies around the world and work out how to try them here. You currently have a 97% CEO approval rating on Glassdoor and a 4.7/5 overall company rating. How do you think you've achieved that? First of all, I don’t see that as an approval of me personally but more of the culture and mindset that our overall leadership team has built. I have a belief that hiring and retaining brilliant people that share a mutual purpose and values is the secret sauce to any successful company, even more so in the digital world.  So ensuring that the business creates an environment that people are proud of, where they can be productive and that they can enjoy is paramount. As is empowering them to do what they believe is the right thing – both for customers and for the business. To try new approaches and reassuring them that failing sometimes is ok!  A critical part of this is flattening hierarchies so that decisions can be made quicker and closer to the front-line as well as removing ego-centric leadership behaviours that ensure decisions are always made for the good of the entire company.  Constantly striving for the perfection that you will never get to, while gaining great satisfaction from all the small improvements you make along the way is a key component of what drives me, our leadership and our overall organisation. As CEO, I am obviously here to work with everyone to create a compelling vision and to ensure we deliver it, but I’m also just another human being – I get great satisfaction in helping others, be it helping think through a key decision, helping our customers to success or even just making others a cup of tea. I’m flattered that people have seen fit to “approve of me as CEO” but I secretly hope they are approving of me as the person that I am. How has the transition from print to digital transformed your company? Today we can reach a massive audience – we have an average of 60 million cross platform visits to our website every month – giving consumers the ability to quickly search through the entire vehicle market. We have over 450,000 cars on our site and over 100 searches are done every second, which helps our customers (dealers and manufacturers) to advertise their stock much more effectively.  In the past it took a large amount of people to publish and distribute magazines all over the country where as now we can do so much more with a smaller, digitally-oriented workforce. But the exciting part is just starting – our data allows us to see which cars are in greatest demand in every part of the country which can help dealers make sure they buy the right cars.  We know what price cars are bought and sold for so we can help consumers understand if they are getting a fair deal, as well as help dealers work out their margins.  We can help consumers understand what their monthly finance payment might be, what price they might get for the car they currently own, whether to buy a new or used car, what other consumers have said about the dealer they are talking to, and so much more. Clearly we are focused on the automotive industry but we don’t see ourselves as an automotive business. We are a digital business, technology business and data business that serves the automotive industry. And this requires a team of outstanding people that have the right combination of innovation and discipline, of data science and design, of technology skills and relationship building skills – but most importantly they need to collaborate together, to lead what has been a slow moving industry into a digital future that is quite frankly very scary for most of today’s participants but one that will benefit everybody. What are your company values? Be determined, be reliable, be curious, be inspirational and be humble.  Five values that we quickly felt were both a description of what has got us to where we are and what we need to be to get us to where we could go.  They are now embedded into everything – recruitment, inductions, performance reviews, exits, leadership assessments – they don’t need to be on the wall, they reside in every person that works at Auto Trader. With the majority of your people being based in the North of England (Manchester) how has that benefited your business? Do you struggle to retain or secure top talent?  We’ve consolidated over 14 offices spread around the country into two offices connected by train – 10 mins walk from Manchester Piccadilly and 10 mins walk from London Euston.  It’s transformed both who we can hire (the talent pools are enormous) and the offering for our employees before, during and after work (both offices are in extremely vibrant parts of the two cities) and it further aids collaboration across all of our people and teams. Manchester has been great for us, particularly in hiring and retaining deeply digital, data and technology skills – we are a relatively large fish in the Manchester pool rather than simply another fish in the London ocean, and we have an attractive culture for those people who can really have an impact in our company and on an industry.  We have a very high bar of entry, but being in Manchester has enabled us to keep improving our workforce and moving our company forward extremely quickly. We've heard you read your Glassdoor reviews from time to time. Why is this important to you? Well, we are a data driven business and I find Glassdoor a great additional source of feedback where employees past and present are going to be extremely honest about their experiences – in a world where talent is such a huge differentiator, employee feedback should be a key component of every CEO’s job. What makes Auto Trader a great place to work? There are lots of things - our position in the industry means we can truly have an impact, our size (800 people) means every employee can be heard, our culture is fast moving, vibrant, progressive and totally unsatisfied with the status quo. But most importantly, the people in the company are truly brilliant, are never daunted by even the biggest challenges and run towards change more than in any other company I have ever been a part of.  I feel incredibly lucky and proud to be part of the Auto Trader story. Fancy working with Trevor Mather at Auto Trader UK? Check out their open jobs here.