Onboard & Offboard

The Role of Human Resource Management in Corporate Social Responsibility

This is a useful resource if you are looking to partner with HR in your company. This guide provides helpful background research on the connection between sustainability and a variety of HR functions, including recruitment, onboarding, and employee development. It also lays out ten steps that HR managers can take to support embedding sustainability within their organisation, along with examples from leading companies.

Next-Generation Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Jobs

As industries embrace and embed sustainability into their planning, processes, and culture, a new imperative has emerged to transition the role and skills - and job description - of CSR and sustainability professionals from an operational to a strategic focus. This briefing provides ideas and examples that will help you to inform and adjust job description updates and performance and professional development plans, and will be particularly helpful for sustainability practitioners and recruitment professionals.

Is Corporate Social Responsibility Part Of Your Recruiting Emphasis

This article will help you to understand the potential of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a tool for employers to recruit and attract strong talent. According to the article, employees are becoming more socially selective when searching for a job, and have a growing preference for employers whose CSR practices align with their beliefs. The article also illustrates three ways that businesses can incorporate CSR results and key messages into their recruiting practices.

A Practical Toolkit to Help Employers Build an Inclusive Workforce

This toolkit from the Mental Health Commission of Canada is an excellent resource for creating an accommodating and inclusive workplace and addressing the needs of workers living with mental illness.

The toolkit is divided into five sections: an organisational self-assessment that will help you to identify what your organisation is doing well and where it can improve; an exploration of workplace strategies and resource for addressing key issues; case scenarios; a framework to help you assess your organisation's ROI and predict related costs; and practical tools that will help you to monitor, evaluate, and ensure ongoing improvement.

The toolkit will benefit HR professionals and employees tasks with wellness, diversity, and other sustainability-related responsibilities to improve recruitment and retention, and to support policies and practices that affect everyone.

Reinventing Employee Onboarding

Onboarding has traditionally been about getting new hires to adopt a company’s values. This study questions the traditional approach by looking at what happens when we do the opposite: engaging new employees to think about their strengths and values, and asking them to bring these to the company.

Advancing Recruiting’s Value Through Uncertain Times: Shaping the Workforce

Most recruitment continues to rely on traditional methods of appraising and acquiring talent - ones that desperately require redesign in the face of multiple intersecting issues. As a result, organisations are increasingly struggling to fill roles with suitable, long-term candidates. Gartner surveyed nearly 3,000 candidates and more than 3,500 hiring managers and found that only 16% of new hires are highly prepared with the right skills for their current position and for the future. This paper explains how recruitment and onboarding strategies must shift from 'replacing' to 'shaping' the workforce, and will help you to build an effective pipeline of appropriately skilled talent.

The Role of HR in Achieving a Sustainability Culture

Creating and embedding a culture of social and environmental sustainability within your business strategy requires comprehensive integration and coordination with human resource functions. Selecting, empowering, and retaining sustainability-minded talent that values the integrity of vital systems means taking a conscientious approach to recruiting applicants, selecting and orientating new employees, evaluating performance, determining compensation and succession planning and training, and more. This research paper from Jay Liebowitz unpacks how creating a “people first” employer-of-choice culture contributes to creating a culture of sustainability and systems stewardship, and will help you to understand the role that HR can play in connecting the dots that will safeguard and grow these efforts.

Leadership for the Decade of Action

This short report will help you to embed sustainability into your leadership culture. Written by the United Nations Global Compact and Russell Reynolds Associates, it identifies leadership attributes that are critical for enacting sustainability-related transformations at the necessary level and scale. The report is informed by in-depth interviews with 55 sustainability pioneers, including chief executives and board members, and would be of particular benefit to reflective, growth-oriented leaders, and to HR teams seeking to hire and develop new leaders.

4 Ways to Attract Top Sustainability Talent

This short article from Sharon Houde at Sustainable Brands provides easy and early entry points for attracting, retaining, and empowering sustainability professionals. This resource will especially benefit recruiters at organisations where sustainability has been embedded into the business, or is in the process thereof.

Outsmarting our brains: Overcoming hidden biases to harness diversity’s true potential

Despite years of good intentions and organised efforts to foster a diverse and inclusive work environment, many companies are still struggling to grow and capture the benefits of fair organisational management. This short guide from Ernst & Young (EY) and the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) explores the implications of hidden biases in today's work environment. It explains hidden bias, including how it emerges and manifests, and highlights ways in which it can affect behaviour in the workplace. This resource is a good starting point for identifying and challenging hidden biases when recruiting and promoting, and includes a list of simple questions, tips, and actions for identifying and correcting such discrimination.

Talent, Transformation, and the Triple Bottom Line

This book by Andrew Savitz talks about how sustainability can be incorporated into employee recruitment, selection, onboarding, career development, rewards, and retention. We specifically recommend Chapter 5, which will help you understand how orientation programs at companies now include modules dedicated to CSR and sustainability. After orientation, targeted sustainability programs are also being incorporated across corporate training curriculum.

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Recruitment, Hiring and Retention

This fact sheet by the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) provides guidance on applying an equity lens to hiring for sustainability-related roles. It covers tactics for supporting diversity and countering bias across the employee lifecycle, including within job descriptions, DEI statements, outreach processes, resume reviews, interview questions, onboarding processes, and more. This practical guidance will be especially useful to hiring managers.