​From speaking to candidates and clients across the sustainability market, I’m seeing a consistent trend. The biggest barrier to building sustainability capability isn't always a lack of talent. It is often a lack of clarity about what that talent is actually being brought in to do.

I regularly see businesses reach the point where they recognise they need sustainability expertise. There is a sense that something needs to happen. Perhaps a new strategy, better reporting, a response to regulation, a net zero ambition, or simply a need to understand what sustainability means for the business.

The instinct is then to recruit.

But who are we recruiting, and what capability are we actually hiring for?

Sustainability has become such a broad discipline that a single job title can mean almost anything. A Sustainability Manager could be responsible for carbon, ESG reporting, supply chains, natural capital, compliance, stakeholder engagement, strategy, communications or organisational change.

The candidate may be highly capable. The problem is that the organisation may not yet know which capability it actually needs.

Here lies the elephant in the room. Sustainability still isn't consistently treated as a genuine business priority.

It is often recognised as important. It appears in annual reports, board conversations and corporate strategies. But there is a difference between recognising sustainability and giving it enough strategic priority to understand what actually needs to change.

When sustainability isn't embedded in the way a business thinks about its future, recruitment becomes reactive.

A company sees a gap and looks for a person to fill it.

But the better question is:

What are we actually trying to change?

Where are our biggest sustainability impacts? What risks are emerging? Where does sustainability intersect with our commercial strategy? What capabilities do we already have? What don't we have? Which expertise needs to sit inside the organisation, and where would specialist knowledge be better accessed externally?

Until those questions are answered, how can a recruiter write the right brief? How can a candidate understand what success looks like? And how can a business assess whether it has found the right person?

These questions matter because not every sustainability challenge requires a permanent hire.

Some require leadership. Some require technical specialists. Some require transformation capability. Others may only require specialist expertise at certain points in a business's journey.

The organisations that understand this will have an advantage.

They won't simply build sustainability teams. They will build the right capability for the problems they actually need to solve.

For businesses, the challenge is therefore no longer simply finding good sustainability people. It is understanding what good looks like for them.

And for those of us working in sustainability recruitment, that changes our role too.

We should be asking:

What does this business need to be capable of doing, and what people, expertise and organisational structure will enable it to do that?

Because the strongest sustainability hiring decisions don't begin with a job description.

They begin with a clearly understood problem.

One of the biggest opportunities for businesses today is to make sustainability important enough not just to talk about, but to properly understand and prioritise.