At McLaren Recruitment, we subscribe to the values of integrity, transparency and community. Doing the right thing is simply how we operate. Not only how we treat our clients and candidates, but also how we work together as a team.
Actions speak louder than words. But in a world overloaded with information and communication, we asked ourselves how do we measure, and prove, these things? What can we point to?
- Firstly, more than two-thirds of our clients are not-for-profit. We’re passionate about advocating for this sector, one that high-quality candidates may otherwise not have considered for their career.
- Secondly, awards help, and we’ve been lucky enough to regularly receive these. Someone has looked at our business, and endorsed the value and impact of what we’re doing.
These things are related to our core business so they make sense to the casual observer.
We were starting to be asked about our carbon emissions by customers with clauses inserted in contracts. Emissions are not normally associated with recruitment, or professional services for that matter. We had done the obvious things like reducing paper from our processes and other environmental offenders like unnecessary travel. But like the rest of our business, we knew true progress required something that we could measure and prove.
We decided it was time to embrace the opportunity to do something tangible about it.
Why Emissions Matter (in Recruitment)
Ultimately, recruitment is about people. People are our product; we couldn’t do what we do without them. And though we’re lucky to call Wellington home, we’re acutely aware of how our global communities are intertwined. We thought, maybe environmental sustainability is not that distant from recruitment after all.
In starting to research what we could do, we came across this statistic from the OECD: SMEs account for 50% of emissions in the business sector. Yet only 10% have measured their emissions. If all of us “negligible emitters” took no action, then this large portion of global emissions would remain unaddressed.
This realisation was impactful and pushed us to want to strive for change – starting with ourselves.
Taking Action
We partnered with CarbonInvoice to measure our carbon footprint and start funding native trees in Wellington to mitigate it.
We found CarbonInvoice to be a user friendly software product that met our needs, simply plugging into Xero to understand our carbon footprint and take real-world action in minutes.
What did we learn?
- Recruitment firms have a carbon footprint: ours is equivalent to about 500 trees annually, or 10 return flights from Auckland to Tokyo.
- Action beats analysis: we were in a position to immediately make a decision and take action by having our emissions truly measured and presented in language we understood: dollars and native trees.
- Native trees just make sense: so far we’ve funded 659 native trees in the Wellington region where we live and work.
Funding trees made sense to us because we’re (1) mitigating our carbon footprint, (2) not offshoring the solution (3) supporting our local communities and biodiversity: we can touch, enjoy and verify our impact.
Some of our 659 native trees being planted at Owhiro Bay in 2023
Our clients and team have wholly embraced this initiative with nothing but positive feedback. It’s easy to see why: native trees evolved here and they make up the beauty, biodiversity and sustainability of our motu. They are part of who we are.
We’re calling on all members of the Wellington and New Zealand business community to do their part, however small. CarbonInvoice is built and headquartered in Wellington, and we’d recommend checking it out as an easy place to start.
The time is now to embrace positive steps in the right direction: if we all did this, then collectively we might just make a difference.
Want to see our progress? Click here!
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