Responsible Business Guide: A Toolkit for Winning Companies

What to actually look for?
CSR ASSISTANCE PARAMETERS-4
Typical candidates might come with great communication and inter-personal skills, but not
necessarily the kind of advocacy or lobbying skills that are essential for CSR work.
CSR professionals need to have highly developed capacities for formulating, designing, implementing
and in most cases, assessing CSR programs. All these indicate a requirement among candidates
for a strong conceptual knowledge of CSR and how it has developed over the years, particularly
the last two decades.
Academic material on CSR is patchy at best, and in any case is not offered extensively enough,
while experiential learning is hard to come by given the nuanced context of CSR in various
sectors or geographical zones.
The blame here clearly does not lie with the aspiring CSR candidate, but with the fact there are
simply not enough basic courses on CSR in college or business schools that can prepare candidates
sufficiently.
It seems we will continue to see aspiring CSR candidates coming from diverse backgrounds,
primarily motivated either by a strong sense of justice and equity, or worryingly, simply by the
pursuit of profits and who only use CSR terminology as a tool for gaining narrow business
advantages.
Those of us hiring for CSR positions will somehow have to learn to differentiate between these
two.
Integral qualities CSR professional must have:
· A sense of justice and fair play
· A demonstrable conviction in the value-led precepts of CSR, possibly with some experience
of activism or association with a cause sympathetic to CSR
· Evidence of innovative or out of the box thinking along with independent judgment
· An understanding of the working of non-governmental organizations, businesses, and the
government, as well as a sense of their historical stances in relation to each other, the new
and evolving ways they have of working together, and most importantly, a clear idea of
where we are all heading
· A reasonable understanding of global frameworks and initiatives driving CSR today
· Some evidence of having had a role in business processes based around ethical practices
· Analytical ability, natural curiosity and an urge to get to the bottom of things
· An enabling attitude, strong interpersonal skills, and a non-threatening or empathetic
personality
· Perhaps above all, the ability to work with others and produce tangible results that mean
something to business in terms of goals and paybacks.
· In terms of preparation, any good education. CSR Training may actually be less meaningful,
simply because there is very little available of an acceptable quality