Embedding sustainability across our business is at the heart of the nGAGE Group strategy. We conduct ourselves ethically, safeguarding labour and human rights and protecting the environment in which we operate. We create a fulfilling environment for our people to work in and instil a belief in doing recruitment the right way. We develop a genuinely passionate group of people who want to look after our candidates and clients for the long-term.

We provide staffing solutions to major employers who are essential to the communities they serve – health services, social care and social housing. In addition, we place people into the jobs of the future through our STEM specialist businesses. This deliberately balanced portfolio enables us to ensure we are investing in the jobs of tomorrow whilst supporting essential jobs for the communities of today.

Our ESG strategy is focused on the following impact areas with strong governance underpinning them all:

1. PEOPLE

2. CLIENTS & CANDIDATES

3. COMMUNITIES & CULTURE

4. ENVIRONMENT

1. PEOPLE

The Group’s strategy for growth is centred on international expansion and creating deep industry expertise by offering continuous development and career opportunities. We are on a journey to be known as an unrivalled place to work and build a career. We are proud to be ranked 1st in “Employment Services” in the UK and 8th across Europe in the Financial Times Long-Term Growth Champions list.

Our people are integral to the success of this strategy, so we are focused on supporting long term careers through our Talent Development programs, a home-grown management team and international mobility to deliver organic, sustainable growth in addition to growth by appropriate acquisitions. This is delivered through managed risk taking in nurturing and developing niche high growth businesses that are essential to building the future of work.

Our global health and well-being offering aims to support our people with access to information on how to maintain and improve health and well-being at work, either at the office or while working from home. We strongly promote equal opportunities and we support the inclusion of people who experience barriers to the labour market, for instance because of gender, age, ethnicity or disability.

2. CLIENTS AND CANDIDATES

We help our clients to find the best talent with the most relevant skills for their business. Our technological expertise, combined with our human touch, enables us to focus on our clients’ business needs by providing tailor-made solutions and the best value creating advice. We help candidates to find jobs and develop their skills so they can have a meaningful career. Our data-driven insights enable us to quickly identify smart career opportunities and make the perfect match. Candidates are personally guided to short- and long-term career success.

We also see ourselves as instrumental in helping our clients address industry skills shortages and facilitating access into work by accessing previously untapped talent. Our brand Bridge of Hope specialises in inclusive hiring practices, working with external clients but also with the rest of the Group’s brands to access talent from a variety of backgrounds including applicants that are neurodiverse, have a history of addiction or ill-health, have a criminal record, have had previous experience of homelessness or have a disability.

3. COMMUNITIES AND CULTURE

Having a meaningful job impacts not only people’s lives, but their communities and wider society. Through our core business and our dialogue with key customers, authorities and other relevant bodies and institutions, we help shape the world of work, maximizing future employment, sustainable economic growth and societal wellbeing.

Focussing on local ensures that we maximise the social impact in the communities in which we serve and operate in. We aim to employ our staff as locally as possible and place our candidates as locally to our clients as possible so that we can continue to contribute to local economic growth and wellbeing.

As a talent management organisation, our expertise in employability is where we can offer the maximum value to society. We therefore focus our efforts on building partnerships with employability organisations to help people enter work (e.g. students), return to work (after a career break for example) or overcome barriers to work (e.g. breaking down barriers that stop certain groups from gaining employment). Our Social Value Policy and Strategy sets out our efforts in more detail and can be found on our website.

4. ENVIRONMENT

Because of the nature of our business, our impact on the environment is far less than that of some other more intensive sectors, such as manufacturing. Despite this inherently minimal impact, we recognise our role in helping to reduce the impact on the environment not just for ourselves but for our clients as well.

We continue to adopt various initiatives to encourage greater environmental awareness and to reduce the carbon footprint of our businesses and have set our target to become net zero by 2050 at the latest. Our biggest emissions stem from our value chain including purchased goods & services, business travel and employee commuting and we are focusing our efforts to reduce emissions in these areas. Nevertheless, we continue to focus on reducing our building-related emissions, too.

We have set out the following environmental aims and objectives across the nGAGE group of businesses:

• Continue to enhance our carbon data quality for our annual carbon footprint exercise
• Establish a net-zero strategy aligned to our clients’ net-zero ambitions
• Continue with our hybrid working model
• Implement a Sustainable Travel Policy to reduce our travel-related emissions
• Implement a Green Building Policy to reduce our buildings-related energy consumption
• Bring our supply chain along on our net-zero journey along with ensuring ethical supply chain practices
• Employ our staff as locally to our offices/clients office as possible to reduce the commuting journey
• Ensure effective waste management and recycling facilities across our offices
• Encourage refillable coffee cups and water bottles as well as bringing your own lunch in to reduce packaging waste
• Enable greener ways of commuting e.g. our cycle to work scheme can be used to buy subsidised regular or electric bikes. In addition, we are now pleased to be able to expend this to eBike hire across UK cities and electric vehicles via our electric vehicles salary sacrifice scheme.

We continue to review our emissions and launch new initiatives to reduce our carbon footprint. You can read more about our carbon emissions reduction and our initiatives in our annually updated Carbon Reduction Plan, available on our website.

OUR GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORKS

Shaping the future world of work can only be achieved in a sustainable way if certain ESG ‘fundamentals’ are addressed. These range from safeguarding ethical behaviour, applying minimum environmental standards, taking supply chain responsibility with regard to being a good corporate citizen, and ensuring our organisation is transparent.

Our governance policies are directly linked to our business values and strategy. They provide our people around the world with specific guidance and instructions on their business behaviour. They cover compliance with business principles, insider dealing, bribery, gifts & hospitality, data protection, discrimination, modern slavery, intimidation and harassment, and e-communications. These policies are a mandatory part of our induction training and are highlighted during refresher training. Promoting best practices and raising awareness of relevant laws and policies is an ongoing process across the nGAGE family.

We support the United Nations Global Compact and its ten principles regarding human rights, labour rights, the protection of the environment and anti-corruption. Our Modern Slavery Statement, reviewed and published annually, sets out the steps we have taken to ensure there is no modern slavery in our business or supply chain and our supply chain code of conduct ensures that our supplies chain operates with ethics and integrity, respecting international laws and standards.

We have identified the following UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to provide focus for our ESG Strategy. As a global recruitment group, nGAGE specifically contributes to decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), industry, innovation and infrastructure (SDG 9) and sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11) in the markets we support from a recruitment perspective. In addition, we look to support reduced inequalities (SDG 10) in the way in which we enable our customers to remove inequality from their recruitment process. Finally through our operations and in line with supporting our clients’ sustainability goals, we contribute to responsible sourcing (SDG12) and climate action (SDG13).

Download our ESG strategy