Hiring Corporate Sustainability Leaders - What You Need to Know

Tips for success

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / April 23, 2024 / With a quantum leap in terms of focus on corporate sustainability and governance, with non-financial reporting and other mandatory requirements such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) coming into force, the competition for corporate sustainability talent is significant.

Foto: Accesswire

Sustainability Recruitment

Driven from multiple angles; regulations, investors, consumers, and employees, 2021 was the start of a dramatic shift in how business leadership saw, and responded to, the broad sustainability and governance agenda. What started as an awareness has now become a business-critical element and altered the way businesses see sustainability and how it integrates into their business model.

No longer ‘a nice to have', sustainability is viewed as an essential corporate function by many, intertwined with established departments like Finance, Procurement, Marketing and Operations.

The effect of this has seen "Green Jobs" grow significantly year on year. Chief Sustainability Officers have grown in number and now take their place at the table alongside other C-suite executives.

What do you need to know about recruiting for a sustainability role?

In what was already a nuanced and composite role, modern sustainability leadership roles have emerged with even greater complexity. This is in response to a myriad of new requirements; from reporting needs such as Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) to consumer, customer and employee demands for Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) related action, visibility, and accountability. All of this means that the role is often subtly different and bespoke to each organisation.

Not immune to the normal rules of supply vs. demand, this talent pool has come under unprecedented pressure. Combined with the complexity of the role criteria, the recruitment process arc often requires informed, creative thinking to reach a successful conclusion.

Here are our tips on how you can hire better, faster and get ahead of your competition throughout the recruitment process:

Define the brief - multiple stakeholders can make for muddled thinking

Sustainability strategies affect all parts of a business, bringing a host of potential "would like to haves" from different stakeholders to the profile.

Whilst it's important to gather all your stakeholders' requirements and build a complete picture of what would be ideal in the incumbent, this can create a muddled and potentially unachievable profile leading to a clunky process.