Sustainability Pledge 2025

Here’s our pledge and the projects we’re undertaking which reduce our impact on the planet.

Over the past five years, we’ve been on a journey to make RMP a more sustainable business.

I’m so proud of the initiatives we’ve created and the support we’ve had from all stakeholders across the market. I’ve also personally enjoyed learning more about an area I’m very passionate about.

I used the word ‘journey’ above because, as with all journeys, they aren’t always smooth or easy or meet your expected arrival time.

In 2022, I wrote this first pledge declaring our intent. We’d just invested in offsetting all our carbon emissions from 2021, making us a Net Zero company for the first time and we were kicking off plenty of exciting projects with our grand vision of becoming “the most sustainable supplier in the early careers market”.

Everything was positive & exciting. We were being shortlisted for multiple different awards for the work we were doing (see below!) and I was being interviewed on podcasts and being invited to events to speak about our successes with the Sustainable Recruitment Alliance.

Then a load of stuff happened which punctured our tyres.

Some within our control, some outside of our control. In no particular order…

Coming out of Covid, both our internal campus activity & client campus activity quadrupled across the UK
We expanded the team and invested in people to help us grow
The price of carbon removal suddenly increased 50% YOY
We entered an economic downturn which tightened our purse strings.

In layman’s terms, even though we’d created some amazing initiatives to reduce our carbon emissions, due to the above and many other factors, our carbon emissions sadly increased YOY…. and coupled with that the cost to offset these emissions to remain Net Zero increased too... and trebled with that, financially we didn’t have as much cash to invest.

It was incredibly frustrating. As an example, investing in a carbon emissions report and Biochar to offset our emissions cost us £15k in 2022… it was suddenly going to cost us nearer £35k.

So we were Net Zero in 2022, but sadly haven’t been able to continue our commitments since.

Two steps forward, one step back. Which relates to everything I’ve learned over the past five years about sustainability. Regardless of which project, decision or consideration, it’s never straightforward and usually comes with consequences… which eight or nine times out of ten is a cash consequence.

I’ve shared a very honest update here. Mainly because I know many of you are at the start of your sustainability journeys and I don’t want to mislead you into thinking it’s all ripe avocados & tasty hummus on freshly baked sourdough bread.

That said, there are so many projects & initiatives we’ve created that I’m super-proud of & hope you gather some inspiration from these learnings:

Planting a tree for every review

Launched in August 2024, we have partnered with TreeApp and planted a tree for each and every student-written review submitted on RateMyPlacement & RateMyApprenticeship.

With over 10,000 unique, peer-to-peer reviews written in 2024, we’re supporting this reforesting project in Tanzania and bringing together our core business of the reviews with our sustainability commitments. We’ve had wonderful feedback from all stakeholders and one of our biggest clients has also launched a similar initiative

We’ve stopped printing publications

Five years ago we were printing 120,000 publications each year, each of them 150-200 pages in size. That’s a lot of paper... equating to roughly 24,000 trees per year. It wasn’t only the production of these which created significant carbon emissions, but the distribution from our warehouse across thousands of schools, colleges and universities was huge too.

At their peak, we were making ~£500k per year from selling advertising space to employers. It was a tough call to stop this income stream, but ultimately the right call from an environmental perspective and a great example of tackling the profit v planet debate. The last two decisions have seen a positive net tree impact of over 34,000 trees each year!

Sustainable hoodies

After reaching out and finding our previous hoodie supplier had no sustainability commitments, we researched & found a new supplier which did!

They were more expensive, but hey, planet over profits right? After a year of working with a new supplier, we had to revise all SLAs; they were unreliable in terms of delivery times and they didn’t work with specific brands - helpful! The whole experience was difficult, so we’ve swiftly moved on and found a similarly sustainable partner in Fluid Branding, who fortunately meets deadlines!

Why the detail? That one decision to switch one supplier of 250 hoodies each year has been a huge investment in time, resources and patience… probably three steps back and four steps forward.

Net Zero Brand Ambassadors

We spent two years running the first-ever Net Zero Brand Ambassador campaign with a Magic Circle law firm.

It was our most successful campaign ever in terms of the engagement and commitment of the Brand Ambassadors, exposure across campus, and hires made as a result of the purpose-driven campaign.

It was a marketeer's dream, let’s do this forever yeh? Nope. Contacts on either side left, sustainability wasn’t as important & they partnered with another supplier. Coooool

Ecovadis

An extremely helpful third-party platform assessing our sustainability performance with plenty of guidance.

I’ve been so impressed with their platform, providing simple, easy-to-understand feedback on all elements to help us benchmark.

Here’s a screenshot of our dashboard for 2024 which gave us a Bronze rating of 53/100.

Under each heading, there are all sorts of subheadings walking us through areas to improve which has given us an ideal step-by-step blueprint for future projects - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Sustainability Champions!

For the past three years we’ve had a team of Sustainability Champions who keep the momentum, lead on projects and ensure multiple pretty green eyes are on the lookout across all teams.

We wouldn’t be where we are today without the team’s input & we enjoy celebrating the wins in our monthly meetings.

So, to bring this all back into a revised pledge - what is the plan going forward?

In 2025 we have budgeted for and are committed to returning to our status as a Net Zero business

Our mission remains to be “the most sustainable supplier in the early careers market”

In 2025 we are hoping we’ll have made enough significant improvements which will upgrade our Ecovadis Bronze to Ecovadis Silver. Once we have achieved this…

…We’ll be well-placed to apply to b-come a B-Corp. The Holy Grail of sustainability accreditations. The process usually takes 12-18 months, so it’s important we give ourselves the best opportunity to be accepted & from research, we believe Ecovadis Silver is a minimum requirement.

Thank

You

Appreciate the time you’ve taken to read this, hope you’ve found it useful and I very much welcome all feedback & any comments you have.

Ollie & the Sustainability Champions