​Insights from Aethr Associates, Tellus Natural Capital and MorePeople.

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How do you build a sustainability team?

Post an ad?

Utilise your network?

Hire a recruiter?

All can work, but what does your business really need?

A Head of Sustainability, a Sustainability Manager, or specialist expertise?

What skills should sit internally versus externally?

What capability do you need now, and what will you need in two years time?

How should sustainability fit within your wider business structure?

Too often organisations recruit before answering these questions, leading to unclear role briefs, mismatched hires and slower progress.

The Challenge

Many organisations recognise the importance of sustainability and are ready to invest in people. Yet before they can make effective recruitment decisions, they need clarity on what they are trying to achieve and how sustainability will create value for their business.

Finding high-quality sustainability talent is challenging enough. When organisations lack clarity on the roles, skills and capabilities they actually need, the recruitment process becomes significantly more difficult and risky.

​The challenge for many is determining whether they need people to build the sustainability engine, creating the processes, governance and reporting structures. Or people to drive sustainability performance by influencing decisions, delivering change and embedding sustainability across the business. Most need both, but the right balance depends on where they are today and where they want to be tomorrow.

The Idea

Aethr, Tellus Natural Capital and MorePeople bring together three complementary elements of sustainability capability. Strategy, specialist expertise and people. Aethr helps organisations understand what they are trying to achieve and where the greatest value, risk and opportunity lie. Tellus Natural Capital provides specialist expertise where that capability is required but does not necessarily need to sit permanently in-house and MorePeople helps organisations recruit the people needed to deliver it (that's us).

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The Opportunity

Many businesses recognise the need to invest in sustainability, but struggle to determine where to focus resources, what capabilities are required, and how those needs will evolve over time. As a result, recruitment decisions are often made without a clear understanding of the outcomes the organisation is seeking to achieve.

Aethr - Provides clarity

Aethr helps businesses establish a clear understanding of their current sustainability position, while looking ahead to the evolving commercial, customer and regulatory demands that will shape their future. This includes defining sustainability priorities, identifying where value, risk and opportunity exist, and developing a practical roadmap for delivery. Once the strategic direction is defined, the conversation shifts from: "Who should we hire?" to "What capability do we need to execute our strategy?"

The result is a clear, evidence-led people plan that defines not only the skills and leadership required today, but the capability needed as the organisation's sustainability journey matures.

This provides MorePeople with a robust foundation from which to advise on organisational design, talent acquisition and long-term capability development, ensuring recruitment decisions are aligned with both immediate priorities and future business needs.

Tellus Natural Capital – Specialist Expertise

Not every sustainability capability needs to be built in-house. Some areas require permanent internal leadership and expertise, while others are better accessed through specialist partners when the need arises. Natural capital is a good example.

Tellus Natural Capital is an independent specialist consultancy advising primarily landowners across the private, public and voluntary sectors on emerging natural capital markets, including Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), nutrient neutrality, carbon, natural flood management and voluntary nature credit schemes. Tellus Natural Capital brings specialist expertise that can be integrated into wider sustainability strategies without businesses necessarily needing to build that capability permanently in-house. This enables businesses and landowners to access the expertise they need, when they need it, while focusing internal resources on the capabilities that are most important to build for the long term.

By gaining an understanding of the types of natural capital opportunity which exist, an organisation will be better placed to recruit new and support existing teams to design and deliver its ambitions.

Why This Partnership Has Potential

Most consultancies focus on strategy.

Most recruiters focus on people.

Together, we bridge the gap between sustainability ambition and organisational capability.

Aethr helps define the sustainability strategy, identify capability gaps and shape the right solution. Tellus Natural Capital brings specialist expertise where required. MorePeople builds the people capability to deliver it.

Instead of asking, "Who should we hire?", we help clients answer the more important question first:

"What capabilities do we need to achieve our sustainability ambitions, now and in the future?"

That creates better hiring decisions, stronger sustainability outcomes and longer term value for everyone involved.