What a great timing to announce that EllisKnight International has become a certified B Corporation® during B Corp™ month!

We are enormously proud to have joined an amazing community of international organisations intent on using business as a force for good. These companies lead with compassion, purpose and a commitment to people and planet – an extraordinary thing to aspire to and the way we feel businesses should conduct themselves.

Our sector is not perhaps thought of in the best light and understandably so – recruiters have for so long often been revered as rogues and vagabonds. Certainly, we have always been so determined to set ourselves apart from that. Helping people find to find meaningful employment is what we do and love but even before we discovered the B Corp™ movement, we knew as a leadership group that we had a collective responsibility to help others and support our community. From organising family fun days to tackling indoor rowing world records to running seven marathons in seven days.

 Click on the image to see our B Impact Report:

The inspiration

The global pandemic understandably meant a recruitment freeze for so many clients – all we could do was to ready ourselves to hold their hand whenever needed and to reassure them that the support would always be available. Despite the constant worry that comes with protecting the job security of a team that you love, the one thing it did give us was a little time to take stock - perhaps for the occasion in six years of growing a young business. Time to think, time to reflect, time to review our blueprint, our mission, and time to establish exactly what is that we stood for. It opened up a world of good that we could do as a business with the right strategy in place and we've not really slept since:

• EllisKnight became the first recruitment agency in the UK to receive both a Gold CSR-A Award and The Planet Mark Certification – we cannot underestimate the confidence these two partnerships, in particular, have given us on our B Corp™ journey.
• We took ownership of our carbon footprint, offset it and became a Carbon Neutral organisation with the support of Climate Care and Ecologi.
• We offset the carbon footprint of every candidate we place to support our client's sustainability goals.
• Ran competitions across our social media channels to plant more trees and twin client toilets with latrines in developing countries with the help of Toilet Twinning.
• Created international giving impacts simply by doing what we do on a daily basis via B1G1.
• We discovered the UN Sustainable Goals, using them as a basis for every EK initiative we could possibly imagine and subsequently became the first recruitment agency globally to be awarded a full set of five stars from Support The Goals.
• Became an Accredited Living Wage Employer.
• Created the EK Pledge to ensure we remained true to our commitments.

The moment we read the B Corp™ declaration was the moment we found our community home. The B Impact Assessment provided a brilliant framework to measure our impact and where we could make those improvements. There is still so much for us to do but we are excited by the partnerships we have in place and those that we are yet to make.

What does it mean to EllisKnight International Recruitment to be a B Corp™?

For us, it's the perfect way to make ourselves accountable to each other, to operate ethically at all times, and to strive to make this world a better one for our children. We believe that every company and candidate should expect that level of commitment from their own recruitment partner. The centre of our EK universe is our team. Every Friday morning, we make a cuppa and meet on zoom for our CSR Huddle. It's a favourite time of the week quite simply because we get to see everyone's lovely faces in one place. They continually inspire us to be the best we can be and they deserve that commitment.

We are so proud to be part of the B Corp™ community but prouder still of our team that enabled us to achieve it. Family is everything to us and without our EK crew, we simply don't have a business to make a positive impact in the world.