Introduction

The essential ingredient to any company’s success is recruiting the right people: motivated employees who can respond to and shape the challenges of the future. But when it comes to integrating Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) into recruitment, current activities largely fail to engage talent. In doing so, they also fail to contribute to sustainable business performance. To see where CSR is falling short, and how to solve the problem, we need to start from the beginning.

CSR is not always an easy thing to define. Inside an organisation, it’s aligned to marketing, communications or HR, and is the main point of contact for information about the company’s impact on the wider world. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), used by 600 diverse organisations from over 50 countries, was launched in 2000 to improve the way CSR information is communicated. Consequently, over the last five years CSR reports have become a popular way to tell good news stories and plans for the future, focusing on areas such as: 

Workplace (What we do for our employees)
Marketplace (What we do for our suppliers and customers)
Environment (What we do for the environment)
Society (What we do for society and the community)

These reports need broad shoulders. They have to speak to all kinds of people at all sorts of levels, all at the same time. Financiers, suppliers, customers, competitors’ employees and candidates… they aim to give each the information that’s relevant to them. Ironically, the GRI’s drive for transparency, comparability and fullness makes these reports long, complicated, and largely unread by the target audience.

Graduate recruitment is a mix of short- and long-term goals. The job of recruiting the best people is a competitive and demanding one. Throughout the year, graduate recruiters must plan, attract, select, and onboard a fresh crop of new joiners to the business. Added to that, there’s also the continuous need to focus on building the company brand. This is to gain loyalty from more people who may or may not be an immediate hire, to make succeeding recruitment activity more efficient and less risky.

The tools of the trade are usually a set of roles (multiple entry points, internships, placements and full-time…etc), a marketing plan, website and an application process. Because of the voluminous and hard to digest way that CSR information is communicated, it is mainly used in overall brand development (a long-term goal). However, in the short-term, it may only appear in the marketing plan or the content of the website - and even then, very scantly. Recent Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) research, released in April 2011, paints a clear picture of this situation:

“75% of graduate recruiters think that CSR is important to candidates, only 69% of them give graduates specific information on it. Of these companies, less than one in four use CSR in any part of their selection process.”

The prospect of leaving university in the future is a bleak one. With ever more debt, and facing an uncertain job market, most graduates are forced to think very carefully about employment and employers. With good reason, graduates are putting what they want first and maximising their own opportunities. That’s not to say they are only thinking short term. work’s own survey of 2,500 current students shows that

“89% want a job that reflects something that they care about, 86% want an employer’s values and ethics to match their own, and 73% think understanding environmental impact is important.”

In the same breath, CSR ranks second-to-last in the wants and needs of graduate job seekers. Instead of being contradictory, these findings show us the problem with CSR in graduate recruitment: graduates are motivated by corporate responsibility but they are poorly served by current information.

Using the annual report as a graduate recruitment tool has become an axiom for good corporate practice. Yes, this ticks off all the CSR boxes. But it does little to provide meaningful information to a prospective graduate candidate. 

The age of sustainability

With 70% of graduates unable to tell the difference between the CSR performance of different employers, it’s an area that seems unimportant in the eyes of next-generation employees. What the market needs is a new kind of CSR, and a new focus for graduate recruitment. One that provides graduates with meaningful information and attracts talent that will contribute to sustainable business performance. The age of sustainability could do just that.

Sustainability has become the umbrella term for what society expects from business. It can also be a useful way to engage graduates and focus on graduate recruitment’s role in business improvement. It’s a trend that’s catching on fast: last year (2010) was the first time that more large companies produced sustainability, rather than CSR, reports.

Reporting is evolving. PriceWaterHouseCoopers’ 2010 review of sustainability reporting found that half the companies they spoke to now use a microsite. Plus, around one in four use interactive diagrams and social networks to connect with the audience. As the quality improves, untapped opportunities to tailor the information to a graduate audience appear.

With the medium for sustainability reporting changing by the day, the messages need to keep up. Students want to know:

• how sustainability relates to thier job.
• what ways employees get involved.
• how sustainability relates to the company strategy.
• if they have the chance to take part.

The age of sustainable graduate recruitment needs to move away from generic information, which is often on a global scale and retrospective. Instead, it needs to look more closely at what the information means for an individual’s career and future. Graduates increasingly expect all employers to behave similarly when it comes to sustainability and CSR. This gives leading employers a unique window to create something much more significant and valuable to graduates in the future.

To make the most of this window of opportunity, graduate recruiters need to look at three main areas:

Recruiting top talent

Create a brand that stands up in the age of sustainability. Giving graduates precise and meaningful information about how sustainability affects their jobs, teams and careers can give organisations a huge competitive advantage.

Enhancing critical competencies 

Graduate recruits assess prospective employers against a strict set of criteria. Companies need to do the same; recruitment criteria should reflect a graduate’s future impact on sustainable business performance, as well as how they fill skills gaps in the current workforce.

Creating incentives for performance

To keep the best talent, innovation needs to be rewarded and entrepreneurial ideas given room to flourish. The right incentives and benefits are crucial to reinforcing what a business wants from its employees. 

Everything comes back to the importance of short- and long-term goals in graduate recruitment. We see a real correlation between what leading employers are looking to achieve, and the immediate role and responsibility of graduate recruiters. Replace irrelevant CSR reports with meaningful sustainability information and employers will be at a significant advantage.

Any activities need to be embedded into the fabric of the job roles, behaviours and rewards to sustain business improvement. They also need to be focused on gaining brand awareness and recognition in the graduate marketplace. As resources dwindle and public opinion strengthens, the emerging question that employers need to address is “How can you help me achieve the difference I want to make in the world?”

We encourage the graduate recruitment community to take bold steps towards answering this question.

Andrew Stephen
Andrew.Stephen@workcomms.com
0207 492 0046