Talent Acquisition Manager and Intern Programme Lead, Sonya Creagh explains how Travelport is using CSR to help attract early talent.

With 92.6% of Gen Z saying a company’s impact on society affects their decision to engage, it’s a no-brainer that corporate social responsibility (CSR) should play a key role in every company’s talent attraction strategy.

Gen Z (born between 1995-2015) have a high level of social awareness, they care about society and the planet. If an employer doesn’t have a CSR strategy or a demonstrable commitment to CSR, there’s a good chance they will be missing out on attracting talent. With 75% of the workforce predicted to be made up of Gen Z by 2030 having a CSR strategy in place is going to give you a clear competitive advantage when it comes to hiring.

Travelport UK’s 13-month internship programme is in its eighth year. Having grown from just six finance interns in 2012, we now have 28 in the areas of finance, data analytics, strategy, HR, technology, and customer and marketing operations.

Since the programme’s inception, our interns have been tasked with being our CSR Ambassadors; driving CSR initiatives is an intrinsic and mandatory part of their internship programme. To date they’ve raised over £85k for local charities, and by the end of summer 2020, we’re expecting that figure to exceed £100k.

Here are some of the benefits that we’ve found from tasking our interns to be CSR ambassadors:

• With a CSR strategy in place, you are creating a competitive advantage when it comes to talent attraction
• Turning your interns into CSR ambassadors gives them a real sense of ownership. The whole experience is character building for them, and it also adds variety to their day to day role
• Our interns arrange all sorts of activities to raise money including a Tough Mudder, cake and samosa sales, Santa Run, 5km/10km runs – all of which encourage employee involvement and most of all make it fun
• It keeps CSR alive and current by encouraging all employees to get involved in these fundraising activities
• There are also charity and local community benefits, so everyone’s a winner!

If this is something that you are considering, here are some tips to get you started:

We have always had a senior leader from the business as the Executive Sponsor for our intern programme and their CSR work: having their buy-in gives the programme weight and more profile.

Start off small and put targets in place: we don’t focus on just fundraising, we also have a ‘Make Your Mark Day’ (Travelport’s colleague volunteering programme) target in place.

We have two previous interns to guide them (not manage): having business support really helps to keep the interns on track with all of their CSR work.

Share all of it on social media: by being loud and proud of your CSR work you are sure to attract Gen Z talent to your business.