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Engagement and recruitment

The government has set an ambition for two million green jobs in the UK by 2030. Consequently, the Green Jobs Taskforce was announced as part of the Ten Point Plan, bringing together industry, academia, trade unions and the skills sector, to independently advise on how the UK can deliver this ambition and support our industries and workers in this transition.

This ambitious goal is attainable through inclusive, equity-based recruitment and an upskilling of employees in the green sector. The green sector has an imminent skills shortage. This extract from the Groundwork Growing Green Careers Report details that “Two-thirds of employers have struggled to recruit staff with the necessary Green skills, illustrating the gap between existing skills in the workforce and the skills needed to support a net zero economy”

There is a unique opportunity to leverage interest in green jobs to expand the talent pool, and bring people with a diverse range of experiences into the green economy. To maximise these benefits, green industry employers can prioritise inclusive recruitment practices.

This section will help you to recruit more diverse employees, extend opportunities to underrepresented groups, and engage them from an early stage.

Build a plan or strategy to attract and recruit diverse talent, such as using minority-focused recruiters

Creating a more diverse workforce aids how organisations serve their local community.  There are many ways to recruit locally, such as advertising with the local job centre or researching local community organisations, centres and events to advertise job vacancies. Many specialist recruiters help organisations find talent from underrepresented groups and communities. They can work to fulfil any EDI targets your organisation may have, and find talented people who may previously have struggled to get ahead in the industry because of systemic barriers.

Even Break exists to solve a particular problem - after employers highlighted their struggle to attract disabled candidates, and disabled candidates highlighted they couldn’t tell which employers were inclusive. Even Break stepped in to bridge a wide gap in the market - matching diverse, disabled talent with welcoming employers.

Social media

Normally, agencies are paid to fill vacancies and are not incentivised to search for promising talent from underrepresented groups. It’s also worth remembering that the new talent may not be on job boards. This is particularly the case for Gen Z talent. It is therefore worth making social media campaigns part of your accessible and inclusive recruitment methods.

Check out existing initiatives to learn from best practices: The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) offers a range of EDI programmes and resources for the engineering sector, including:

Career side-stepping is an important part of an employee’s professional development. It allows employees to reflect on their experiences and the skills they have acquired in order to decide the next goals in their career path. Partnering with local community job centres can be a powerful way to recruit talent.

To serve a community, the community must be reflected in a company’s workforce. Employers who disregard gaps in CVs, parents who are re-entering work, or prospective employees wanting to upskill in an industry, are isolating themselves from a wide range of diverse experiences.

Proactive initiatives like partnering with local community job centres to offer CV workshops will simultaneously impact the way an organisation’s talent team will recruit, while also providing clarity on how those from the Priority Groups can enter the industry. While these initiatives may take longer to execute, their impact on local communities and the industry is essential.

There is also a need to educate more people on the opportunities available in green skills jobs. Utilising a tool such as this career mapping tool can help those who do not have any contacts in the sector to understand the potential benefits to a career in the green sector and the pathways to more senior positions. While case studies such as these can help provide practical examples of those career paths.

During our research, employers in the green sector highlighted that recruiting women from ethnic minority backgrounds can be challenging due to the male-dominated nature of the industry. Employers reported not seeing any Pakistani or Bangladeshi women applying to fill their vacancies. According to the 2022 Ethnicity Facts and Figures report, the three sectors with the highest representation of Bangladeshi and Pakistani women in the UK are:

  1. Public admin, education and health 31.3%
  2. Distribution, hotels, and restaurants 25.9%
  3. Banking and Finance 16.3%

Research the industries above to identify opportunities to connect with leaders in those industries to learn from their experiences. Consider analysing if there is a skills overlap that could inform a cross-industry career drive that benefits both industries equally. Alternatively, identify opportunities to target people looking for a career change and ways to support them in utilising their transferable skills.
 

During our engagement with employers, leaders in the green economy stated that the industry needed to do more to become representative in marketing, job advertising, and imagery. Doing so can positively impact your organisation’s talent pipeline, reputation and influence the future demographics of your company. It is essential that while working towards more diverse representation for your marketing engagements, you are simultaneously working on building a more inclusive culture that ensures diversity is embraced.

This could include having community-targeted jobs fairs or interventions, for example, hosting a drop-in at a community jobs centre or adult education centre to advertise your organisation and the available job opportunities. This can be particularly important to reach communities that may have internalised social messages about the types of jobs they are suited to.

To make diversity a tangible outcome, identifying opportunities to provide funding for Priority Groups is imperative in ensuring that the green sector reflects the wider community it belongs to. It is important that employers understand that such opportunities are essential towards empowerment of these groups, rather than because it ticks a box.

As a first step, it is crucial that employers research local demographics, pinpointing the makeup of Priority Groups within the community. This research should include both qualitative and quantitative data, to collate a wide range of information and to address the key issues for these groups. You can reach out to local colleges or universities to enquire about opportunities to fund awards or scholarships. Commitment to remuneration and funding must be confirmed by board members and communicated throughout the organisation. Once research has been completed, it is vital to create an inclusive communications strategy that centralises empowerment and positive action.

Consider bias when defining entry requirements to funding or scholarships. It is important to prioritise accessibility as funding and scholarships are opportunities to include the most underrepresented in our communities. This can have an impact on how the industry is viewed by your local community as well as its future.

The University of Exeter is funding ‘Green Futures’ postgraduate taught scholarships for candidates from low income countries as a way of opening up equitable opportunities for those belonging to a specific Priority Group.

Partnering with Amazon, Dream.Org is offering a round of scholarships to ‘Black and Brown Job Seekers’ towards careers in clean technology. Based in the US, Dream.Org are ‘creating new economic opportunities in overlooked communities’ through partnering with community organisations, government, prisons, and universities.

Follow inclusive recruitment best practices

One of the main ways your organisation can attract a broader range of talented people is to follow inclusive recruitment best practices. Debiasing your job advertisements and following the best practice tips below will also help you build an inclusive culture since people within your organisation will see that your hiring practices are designed to find the best people with the right skills for the job.

Inclusive recruitment best practices for job adverts includes: 

  • Using inclusive language in your job advert;
  • Focusing on the skills and competencies needed for the job being advertised, (avoid making your ‘essentials’ list too long);
  • Considering whether academic achievements are necessary for the role before making them a requirement;
  • Avoiding jargon;
  • Stating a salary, or a salary range;
  • Directing candidates to a named person should they need to discuss any access requirements or request the advert in a different format;
  • Consider if you can offer the job on a flexible basis, part-time, or as part of a job share – if you can, say so;
  • Avoiding asking for several years’ experience in the same role, or asking for continuous employment - this discourages those with CV gaps, and for people looking to change careers and use transferable skills;
  • Promoting your organisation’s EDI policies and commitments;
  • Keeping roles open for the full application period and not closing them early;
  • Ensuring all job adverts adhere to these best practice principles.

Now your job adverts are inclusive, it’s time to think about the other stages of the recruitment process.

Ensure you have:

  • Diverse and equitable hiring panels; 
  • Standardised competency-based interview questions with a focus on asking about skills;
  • Communicated procedures for offering and requesting reasonable adjustments;
  • Anonymous CV reviews, to avoid discrimination and make the hiring process more efficient. Remove irrelevant information (including names of educational institutions) from applications when reviewing candidates; 
  • Run inclusive recruitment workshops or training for all hiring managers. 

You may wish to consider using positive action in recruitment when a particular demographic is underrepresented in your organisation’s workforce. Positive action is about taking specific steps to improve equality in the workplace that either do, or may, advantage a particular underrepresented group.  There are numerous different ways to take actions that would be ‘positive action’, but it is important to be able to show that those steps are applicable for your organisation in particular. This resource contains some useful information on positive action, including its purpose and when it can be applied, and examples of how to use it. Additionally, you must know the difference between positive action, which is legal, and positive discrimination, which is not legal.

Business In The Community's Inclusive Recruitment initiative ‘Opening Doors’ calls on employers to commit to specific actions to improve diversity; a number of green industry organisations are Opening Doors employers, including BP and Thames Water.

One way your organisation can commit to improving inclusion for those with disabilities is to sign up for the Disability-Confident scheme and progress through to become a Disability Confident Leader (Level 3). 

The Disability Confident scheme is a free, voluntary, government programme that helps employers make the most of disabled people’s talents in the workplace. This article gives top tips for ensuring your recruitment practices are accessible.

You should also display information on your website that promotes inclusion. For example, you can do this by:

  • Providing guidance on physical access to your premises or office space.
  • Detailing how your organisation can support candidates with disabilities through the recruitment process.
  • Highlighting your website’s compatibility with tools such as screen readers.

Consider committing your organisation to the Access to Work scheme. This will help potential candidates identify your organisation as an inclusive and supportive place to work. Also the Disability Confident scheme is a free, voluntary, government scheme with three tiers, that supports employers to make the most disabled people’s workplace skills.

This article entitled The Green Economy and Job Creation: Inclusion of People with Disabilities, authored out of Cornell University, speaks to the mutual benefit of disability inclusion in the green economy drawing on experiences from green sector development in the USA.

Diversity and Ability's Global Inclusion Kitemark offers organisations a step by step approach to embedding EDI, from foundational to change-making levels, together with a recognisable ‘stamp’ once each step is embedded.

The Government has also published a guide on how to become a Disability Confident employer, including information on organisational and community benefits.

Ensure all interns and staff are paid at least the London Living Wage (LLW)

The London Living Wage (LLW) is calculated independently from the National Living Wage (NLW) due to the higher cost of living within London. Paying below this puts workers and their families at risk of falling into poverty. Paying the LLW allows London workers to afford necessities and potentially save for the future. As a result of better wages, it is more likely that your organisation will be able to retain staff, especially when the LLW is combined with clear progression opportunities.

Work with diverse intern, apprenticeship or access partners

Working with diverse intern or access partners can help you find talented individuals at the start of their career journey and allow you to shape and develop their career trajectories, often with support from partner organisations.

Apprenticeship programmes can place your employees on a path to management positions, helping to create a sense of commitment and longevity in the sector. Returner programmes may also be an effective way to engage, particularly for those with caring responsibilities. These are formal schemes offered by employers to provide training and support to people who have taken time out of the workplace. They provide people who have taken career breaks the opportunity to refresh their skills and build professional networks. According to research by PwC, addressing the career break penalty could provide a £1.7 billion boost to our yearly economic output.

The Royal Society of Chemistry has a lot of information on the role of chemistry in sustainability, guidance on options at 14, 16, apprenticeship routes and more. They have also recently made a series of commitments following their report - Missing Elements: Racial and ethnic inequalities in the chemical sciences - on race in chemistry.

Bright Network assists young people with acquiring key environmental and sustainability strategies and key communication skills, as well as gaining broad experience in environmental business strategies giving a solid grounding for studies.

The Green Skills for Jobs and Entrepreneurships is a successful programme run in the South-West which could serve as a blueprint in other parts of the country. The programme has so far seen more than 70 young people (aged 18-28) from minority backgrounds through a green skills training programme, and has helped to generate an inclusive talent pipeline for businesses. You can also find more information and videos. 
 

Engage with training and education providers to improve opportunities for underrepresented groups

There are multiple ways to create diverse and impactful recruitment pipelines, particularly through engagement with training and education providers, including:

  1. Engaging in outreach events at local schools or universities, with a focus on talking to underrepresented groups. For example, consider hosting workshops for primary and secondary schools that explore the green sector and what roles are available.
  2. Host a stand at university / school career fairs. This is a great way for new employees to gain more confidence in their role and the organisation as a whole, as well as inspiring young people to consider pursuing a career in an industry they may not have considered.
  3. Host workshops which help students improve the skills they need to land the job they want, for example CV and cover letter writing, or interviewing skills.
  4. Participate in and sponsor apprenticeship or other access schemes targeted at Priority Groups - ensure that these are adequately paid, and in line with London Living Wage (LLW).
  5. Collaborate with schools and universities to host specialist skills training days for the green sector.
  6. Mentor young people or encourage your staff to mentor young people, providing them with time off to do so - representation is hugely important, particularly at a young age.

Opportunities for women and girls, particularly from minority ethnic backgrounds, to fully contribute in the largely male-dominated green sector, are helpfully opened up through educational pathways and improved understanding of the sector. Contributing to green skills for girls, as well as awareness of roles and career paths, from an earlier age is an important factor in increasing the representation of women in green jobs. To facilitate a better understanding of green roles and career paths for girls, you can reach out to local schools and colleges to organise speakers on green jobs, green skill-building workshops, or even green festivals to celebrate principles of sustainability and encourage girls’ participation.

Use a contextual recruitment system to broaden access by taking into account your job candidate’s background

The Rare Contextual Recruitment System (CRS) has been designed to allow recruiters to understand the context in which a candidate has gained experience. It can help employers consider the skills of a broader and more diverse pool of applicants including some that may otherwise be overlooked. The CRS was thoroughly researched and designed over a period of more than two years in collaboration with top universities and global employers. It uses big data and candidates’ application responses to produce real-time contextual information on all the candidates, so that candidates with the most potential are not screened out.