POSTED BY
Nicole Sopkovich
We are moving our carbon neutral agenda to the next level...
Earlier this year VIDA and Matt Burton Associates announced our plan to become a Carbon Neutral Business. This was something we had discussed for some time and felt we could make the changes to move toward this goal. So, we partnered with James Staniforth at Sustainable Business Services to help us understand how we could move this forward and not just tick boxes! We were able to learn so much about our footprint, carbon impact, and how we can move the dial on reducing it.
We've done what we can already:
- Assessed the level of carbon footprint
- Discussed how we can make changes and shifted our thinking
- Questioned utility providers from our serviced office
- Recycled more
- Bought local
- Moved to EV's where possible
- Reduced commutes and culturally shifted to working from home
- Assessed home energy suppliers
But... we knew we were capable of much more.
Carbon in Recruitment:
The carbon impact linked to the recruitment process is something that we feel is not being addressed enough.
So, we took the time to do some analysis of the recruitment processes we ran from 2019-2020 to see how we could play our part in reducing the impact of carbon.
we also did some digging for the sectors we recruit for…
Interestingly, studies have reached the surprising conclusion that the pharmaceutical industry is more emissions-intensive than the automotive industry. Pharmaceutical companies emit GHGs directly from their factories and production processes as well as indirectly through their consumption of fossil-fuel power.
How does this link to recruitment?
From 2019 we have seen a phenomenal rise of jobs in the Life Sciences sector with an expected 1m+ global appointments in 2021 across MedTech and Pharma. Each of these processes often requires multiple clients and candidates to travel locally, domestically, and internationally by trains, cars and even aeroplanes. When applying a calculation of an approximate recruitment process’ carbon impact– this section ALONE could create an excess of 650,000 TONNES.
Our Solution:
We came up with a bespoke solution to ensure that all VIDA's processes across the globe are carbon neutral... actually, net-zero! With the help of James Staniforth, we have created a proprietary assessment tool using a combination of historic and live data, which has allowed us to be able to assess the impact of our average recruitment process and its carbon footprint.
We took the average from that calculation and came up with a solution that allows us to offset with one of the three Gold Standard approved projects that we’ve chosen, and contribute to the planting of global seagrass, which is vital for marine life in our oceans. Which project to support is dependent on if the process is for global, regional, or local level recruitment and whether it requires flights, road travel, and/or accommodation. Because (obviously) the carbon impact for a local process is lesser than that of a global process, so we have different options to suit us and our clients alike...
Now that we took the time to learn about the carbon impact of our company and the industry that we’re in, we decided it was a good time to educate and even assist our clients going forward- so, we came up with a hassle-free carbon offsetting solution that we provide for our clients, to help with their carbon agenda.
Example of how this works: a typical US appointment can involve international or national flights as well as road travel and accommodation. This can equate to circa 2+ tons of carbon, which we can then offset with one of our global projects to balance that carbon footprint – this will ultimately reduce emissions globally and create sustainable development benefits for communities around the world.
Appointing key people does require some face-to-face meetings, so there is the inevitable travel that comes along with recruitment, therefore the more the industry can offset, the better.
Our Goal
Our ultimate goal is to lead by example: Hopefully, the work we do will drive others to think in a similar way about the overall impact from recruitment and allow everyone to collectively come together to ensure the industry becomes net-zero.
