Prospective employees are more and more focused on functional and practical efforts to help reduce human impact on climate change. This means that organisations who want to recruit talent need to make sure that their organisations are doing more than just paying lip service to this key recruitment requirement.

According to SHRM, this has resulted in talented candidates wanting to work for organisations that have purpose-driven cultures that put the planet and the growing risk to the climate front and centre. This is backed up by polling that found 68.4% of employees purposefully consider the “environmental record” of a prospective employer. Therefore, employer branding and climate change are interconnected.

In this article we will explore how climate change jobs or green economy jobs can mean more than narrowly defined jobs in sustainability-specific fields. What this means is that working for organisations that place sustainability and climate-related issues front and centre helps in terms of onboarding and retaining talent in all sectors. Let’s find out why?

Recruitment & Climate Change - An Ever-Evolving Relationship

As more and more companies focus the challenge of climate change. Global bodies like the UN Global Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) and other platforms like the DOW Sustainability Index have provided organisations with practical and functional ways to deploy sustainability in the workplace. This has resulted in sustainability and the impact of climate change becoming a central theme within the recruitment process.

SHRM has found that businesses that have placed climate change and sustainability at the core of their organisational culture have helped to build an employer branding offer with a defined and crucially measurable impact that can be quantified and monitored by potential candidates.

Employer Branding & The Climate Emergency

People Management believe business organisations need to place the “Green Agenda” and the very heart of Human Resource Management. However, they also articulate a need to place an employer’s branding and culture-building exercises into the context of better recruitment. This is about telling a story. A story that helps highlight not just Net Zero pledges, the installation of recycle bins in offices or social media content articulating your climate pledges, but instead a narrative that provides all stakeholders – including potential employees – with an elevator pitch, of sorts, stating how your organisation understands the climate emergency and what you are doing and how your culture (and employer branding) is making a difference.

Onboarding Talent & The “Sustainability Conversation”

Employer branding is a useful device to help improve organisational culture and help provide the impetus for real change. However, this requires talent onboarding professionals to better understand climate change and how this impacts their business. If your HR and recruitment team are left in the dark in relation to your sustainability goals and objectives, they can’t help in leading the conversation with talent. With more and more college and school leavers understanding the impact of climate change, recruitment professionals will need to deliver coherent “sustainability conversations” with talent – and to do this they will need the knowledge, the data, and the leadership and culture to deliver for climate conscious would-be employees.