Trust Talks: Stella talks culture

Hi Stella, tell us about your role at Mount Anvil

Hello! I head up our recruitment team. I worked in the construction industry for a long time before I joined Mount Anvil, and honestly culture-wise there just no other developer like this one.

That means that working here definitely isn’t for everyone, so I’m here to make sure that the right candidates end up in the right chairs.

Why is building trust at the heart of your role?

Good question! I’m not partner or resident facing, but to trust us as a business, people need to be completely confident in our people and their ability to deliver.

I think all of that – how well our people perform, how good we are at what we do – comes back to culture, and cultural fit. Mount Anvil is more than the sum of its parts, but the parts matter and how they work together matters.

That’s why we recently introduced new ways of looking for cultural fit during our interview process. We call them super groups and cultural panels – trained teams from across Mount Anvil who get the culture, who breathe the values. 

They’re part of our interviews now, and they’re only there to make sure that someone is the right fit for our culture – and if they’re not, they don’t get the job. They could have the best CV, the best qualifications, the right experience… it’s still ‘game over’ if they’re not going to be able to do their best work here. 

Why is this important for our partner or their residents?

My job is full of details like the super groups and cultural panels – things that partners might never even hear about, but that make us better at what we do.

I spend my days ensuring that Mount Anvil is stacked with the best people for the job. I guess that’s most directly relevant to residents in terms of our community engagement roles. That’s a part of our recruitment that I’m pretty obsessive about – how are we shaping and developing those roles? Who are we putting into them? What experience do they already have of urban regeneration? – but it’s really just the tip of the iceberg.

The decisions I make across the board are made with our homes, our partners and residents in mind. My work helps us continue to be a business that 100% justifies the trust people put in us.

And finally, what’s next? 

When we started using super groups for our interviews, we had six people in the first group. That’s already doubled to 12 people, and we’re already training 25 more people to sit on our cultural panels.

So what’s next? Getting these champions up to speed, enhancing their interviewing skills and ensuring they’re across a cultural framework that will enable them to make informed, data-driven decision about whether a person is right for Mount Anvil.

That will help us to keep bringing in those unique, talented people who make up Mount Anvil, inspire real trust, and light projects up right across the business.