Our ESG and Social Impact

Our ‘Helping for your tomorrow’ (HFYT) programme aligns our fundraising and volunteering efforts around the world, providing every Hays employee paid volunteering time each year. This initiative has been fully embraced by our UK offices, totalling over 17,000 volunteering hours in the last financial year alone – the highest annual volunteering hours of all our global businesses. This achievement earned our UK business the Impact Award at our global Helping for Your Tomorrow Awards, recognising our people’s desire to help local communities across the country. 

Along with providing more volunteering opportunities, our HFYT programme has empowered our people with the time and resources to raise life-changing funds, including over £400k for our UK charity partner, EveryYouth. 

Expanding on the paid HFYT volunteering hours we offer, we partnered with Neighbourly to broaden our reach and help even more good causes across the UK. Our first campaign in 2023 saw over 1,800 of our people donate close to 10,000 hours of volunteering time in just ten working days. We supported 1,282 good causes, helping over 83,000 people with their services, resulting in a financial impact of over £163,000.

Fast-forward to our 2024 two-phase campaign, we’ve connected over 1,300 of our people to 190 events around the UK, totalling over 6,600 hours of volunteering time during the month of May. Using the average UK salary, this has equalled £116,000 worth of financial impact for local communities. And since launching in October, our ‘always on’ skills-based phase has challenged our people to lend their expertise to a variety of good causes, sharing valuable careers advice, IT skills, marketing support and more.

As a leading recruitment and workforce solutions provider, we’re lending our expertise and national reach to help level the playing field for young people, and ultimately do the right thing. Since 2019, we’ve been working with EveryYouth, a charity dedicated to ending youth homeless by driving social mobility for the UK’s most disadvantaged young people.

Raising over £400,000 to date, our year-round fundraising efforts have created a lasting social impact, equating to 296 young people placed into an employment, education or training pathway, or 16,000 hours of 1-2-1 job coaching support, or even funding the entire EveryYouth’s employment programme, EveryYouth Employed, for almost 14 months.

In response to the growing obstacles that young people face, we launched Project Flourish, created in collaboration with EveryYouth: a first of its kind pro bono consultancy service designed to tackle inequality in employment opportunities. We’ve currently placed 12 young people in meaningful job opportunities, while also facilitating 13 pilots with different employers, and established a pipeline of 70 potential job opportunities.

Both employers and enrolled young people are provided continued support, including access to our Hays Superboost bursary scheme, dedicated mentorship, and a host of health, wellbeing, and employability resources available through our Learning Management System (LMS), which 400+ young people have accessed to date.

We’ve generated over £153,900 in social value through our Project Flourish activities to date, and won the Creating Capability award category at the Social Value Awards 2024, acknowledging our work in building skills and capacity to deliver social impact.

Trees belong everywhere – even in cities. Deeply rooted in our culture and history, they provide a link between the past, present – and crucially – future, protecting us from climate change and boosting our health and wellbeing.

In 2022 we teamed up with UK-based charity, Trees for Cities, breathing new life into our communities and urban environments by supporting their tree-planting projects. Since then, we’ve helped plant thousands of trees across the UK – including London, Bristol, Cardiff, Dundee, Blackpool, Portsmouth, Hull, Birmingham and Bradford – seeing our people get green fingered and involved with their local communities. In 2023 alone, 90 volunteers from Hays visited 10 locations across the country and helped to plant nearly 39,000 trees.

We’re always looking for opportunities to minimise our environmental impact and model supply chain transparency on a global scale. Through our partnership with Commercial, our UK business consumables supplier, we’ve generated £509,786 in social value through a greener supply chain since our contract began in September 2021.

Moreover, this funding goes back into a social enterprise that supports getting young people into work; an initiative that’s closely aligned with our own ethos of supporting the employability of disadvantaged young people.

Our partnership with Band of Builders (BoB) is all about championing mental health in the construction industry. Since June 2023, we’ve visited 570 clients across the country to talk candidly about mental health and provide workers on site with access to further support. The collaboration has generated over £31,000 of social value, and BoB has received a significant uplift in requests for help.

We’re delighted to have been shortlisted for the 2024 Inside Out Employer Initiative Award for our partnership with BoB, where we received ‘Highly Commended’.

As part of our commitment to a more sustainable world of work, we’re working with Key4Life, a crime prevention charity reducing youth re-offending through an innovative rehabilitation programme for those in prison and at risk of going to prison.

We’ve been lending our expertise across the employability stage to prepare candidates for the world of work: from ‘Dragons Den-style’ business presentation session to confidence-building mock interviews. Our people have so far provided their support to Thameside HMP in South London, along with sites in Leicester and Bristol, with a single skills-based volunteering visit generating approximately £2,525 of social value.