Why Use a Sustainability Recruitment Agency / Benefits of Specialist Recruitment Agencies
With the growing focus on sustainability we are naturally seeing a sizeable increase in demand for Sustainability and ESG talent. However, many businesses are making mistakes in their hiring process, resulting in the re-running of entire hiring processes and in some cases employing the wrong candidate.
In nearly all cases this is due to a lack of knowledge of the ESG and Sustainability employment market and can simply be overcome by working directly with a specialist sustainability recruitment agency.
With climate change being a topic if interest to most people and seen as a growth area, most recruitment agencies on your existing PSL will say they can support you in hiring in the sustainability space, however they lack any sector knowledge, do not have existing candidate pools or networks and their ability to attract top talent is impeded by their lack of a brand in the market. Therefore, the non-specialist agency will simply advertise the role and try to work out who is the best candidate, something any company could do for themselves and certainly not what you should consider paying a significant fee for.
Not looking to specialist recruiters to support your talent acquisition and instead looking to utilise existing suppliers, whilst simpler in the short term, risks several detrimental mid to long term issues, primarily not ensuring access to the market’s best talent and thus limiting the quality of the business’s employees.
I thought therefore it might be beneficial to outline why a specialist recruiter is worth adding to your supplier list:
Market knowledge& Industry Experience– a specialist can add significant value to any search because they understand the sector they work in, it’s nuances, trends and challenges, they can actually identify a very strong candidate, know where to find them and what motivates the candidates too move.
Additionally, a specialist sustainability recruitment agency will be able to better support you with market information, such as competitor analysis and benchmarking, market salaries and benefits, how to best position the role to maximise interest and ensure you avoid potential issues before they become problematic.
It is worth noting that the sustainability recruitment space can be an extremely confusing one due to the fact it continues to evolve rapidly and several businesses looking to make their first ever hire in the space.
This has caused the sustainability employment market to be very fractured with job titles, salaries, reporting lines, role responsibilities, reporting lines, position in the company’s organisational chart and terminology varying wildly. Using a specialist will help you navigate these problems and maximise your chance of securing the best talent for your business.
Access to Talent – an agency that specialises in ESG recruitment works with these candidates every day, giving the agency far better candidate engagement and attraction. This is because they have a reputation in the market and so candidates come to them when they are seeking new roles, they also have a database full of talented candidates from their previous work, their agencies are followed on social media by candidates and vitally they have deep and broad networks to leverage in the acquisition of the talent you need to grow your business.
As a result the candidate pool is vastly bigger and therefore you will get a higher quality batch of candidates to select from. This is in turn means you are less likely to have to repeat your hiring process as you will have a number of candidates you would be willing to hire, saving you time and money.
Your Brand – greenwashing is term we hear a lot at the moment and getting your recruitment in the sustainability space wrong can have real and damaging consequences for your brand. If you go to market incorrectly this can reflect extremely poorly on your business. This is often caused by naivety rather than a lack of purpose, but that does not stop it impacting your ability to attract talent and potentially also retain the staff you have.
Quality of candidates – a business is built on the talent of it’s staff and so any hiring opportunity is a chance to improve the quality of the company, a specialist recruitment agency in the climate space will provide a higher quality of candidate, not just because they have access to more candidates, but because they utilise their knowledge to better assess the candidates before submitting them. This again means a hiring manager you will waste less time reviewing CVs and interviewing candidates that are unsuitable, enabling them to spend more time being productive in other aspects of their job.
Faster and Better hire – the result is a smoother more successful process, in which you will hire a better calibre of candidate, adding to the capability of the team and its morale. Having this peace of mind enables you to better focus on other challenges and it is always worth noting the damage a bad hire can have, not just on productivity but on the wider team and the fact you may have to go to market again to repeat the process sooner than you would like.
In summary, specialist ESG and Sustainability recruitment agencies are valuable resources for optimising the hiring process and job search, leveraging their expertise to ensure a successful match between candidates and employers.