Impact Report 2019

Annual Impact Report 2019

“We bring about positive
change around the world by
placing exceptional people into
meaningful roles within good
organisations”
Our Purpose

“Society will be the retained
recruitment partner of choice
for responsible businesses and
purpose-driven organisations”
Our Mission

Introduction
This report is our attempt to look back on the year 2019, and to update our
stakeholders on some of things we were focusing on during that period.
As a company, the most significant development of
our year was that we became a Certified B
Corporation. Certification is helping us to
address two long-term questions that have
bothered us since our inception:
1. How do we demonstrate to external
stakeholders that we genuinely ‘walk
the walk’ when it comes to issues of
responsibility and sustainability?
2. How do we bake our commitments and
our values into the very fabric of the
business, such that they will endure over
the long-term, regardless of any future
changes in our ownership or management?
B Corp Certification also elevates these annual reports that we’ve been producing on a
voluntary basis for many years into a formal legal requirement, mandated by our
Articles of Association. With that in mind, we are taking it more seriously than ever before, and
have expanded the number of topics on which we are reporting.
I would like to thank our Board and our colleagues, in particular the members of our Corporate
Responsibility Committee, for their work on pulling this all together.
Simon Lucas
Managing Director

2019’s Vital Statistics
125 assignments
84 clients
19 different
countries
10% of our profits
donated to The
Society Foundation
23 colleagues
7 different
nationalities
2 offices
23 charitable gifts
given on behalf of
placed candidates
302 hours of
colleague time
volunteered
to community
organisations
17.09% mean
gender pay gap
52.8 Net
Promoter Score

Our Social Impact
We think of our social impact holistically, encompassing how we affect our
clients, our candidates, our colleagues, our suppliers, our wider community,
and the recruitment industry at large.
We see our key social impacts as:
• the quality of the appointments we
help our clients to make and the
impact those individuals subsequently
have in-post;
• the integrity with which we help
candidates to define and to attain
their career objectives;
• the way in which we look after, and
develop our colleagues;
• the extent to which our business
consumes resources, and the size of
our carbon footprint;
• the impact and longevity of our work
in the community;
• the leadership we show within the
wider recruitment industry on issues
of responsibility, ethics, sustainability,
diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We’ve sought to make tangible
improvements in each of these areas over the
past year, which the remainder of this report
hopefully illustrates. As ever though, we
believe that the most significant way in which
we contribute positively towards society is
through the appointments we help our clients
to make. The impact that those individuals
have in-post has undoubtedly been our
single most crucial driver since the
company’s conception.
Increasingly we are choosing to look at the
appointments we handle through the lens of
the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Set in 2015 by the United Nations General
Assembly, and intended to be achieved by the
year 2030, the SDGs are comprised of 17
global goals designed to be a "blueprint to
achieve a better and more sustainable future
for all".
Here’s how our work related to those goals
during 2019:
1 NO POVERTY 3 GOOD HEALTH &
Rashmi Pillai appointed
as Executive Director
of Financial Sector
Deepening Uganda
Aread more
WELL-BEING
Avril Benoît appointed
as US Executive
Director of Medecins
Sans Frontieres
Aread more

4 QUALITY
EDUCATION
Edward Sparrow
appointed as Chair
of the St Laurence
Education Trust
Aread more
5 GENDER EQUALITY
Sophie Walker
appointed as Chief
Executive of the Young
Women’s Trust
Aread more
6 CLEAN WATER &
SANITATION
Francesca Lemanczyk
appointed as DFID
Business Development
Manager for WaterAid
Aread more
8 DECENT WORK &
ECONOMIC WORK
Martin Houghton-Brown
appointed as Chair
of the Centre for
Youth Impact
Aread more
10 reduced
INEQUALITIES
Ian Maginnis appointed
as Chair of the British
Exploring Society
Aread more
11 SUSTAINABLE CITIEIS
& COMMUNITIES
Darius Khwaja
appointed as Chief
Executive of Wac Arts
Aread more
16 peace, justice
& strong
institutions
Ben Kernighan
appointed as Chief
Executive of Leap
Confronting Conflict
Aread more
17 partnerships for
the goals
Jo Ellis appointed as
Executive Director of
FRED Leadership
Aread more

Our Structure and Governance
Society is a private limited company, registered in England and Wales. We
have one wholly-owned subsidiary, ‘Society US Inc’, which is head quartered
in New York and registered in Delaware. Both companies are ultimately
overseen by a Board consisting of our Managing Director and two
Non-Executives.
The current shareholdings within Society are:
Simon
Lucas
(35%)
Daniel
Perrett
(30%)
Simon
Laver
(30%)
Emma
Hart
(5%)
As a B Corporation, our Articles of Association contains a pre-amble on ‘Responsibility’ that states:
“The purposes of the Company are to promote the success of the Company for the benefit of its
members as a whole and, through its business and operations, to have a material positive impact
on society and the environment, taken as a whole.”
The new text goes on to define a series of ‘Stakeholder Interests’, that the Board must seek to balance
as effectively as it can, without assuming any one area should take precedence over
the others. These include:
• the likely long-term consequences of any decision;
• the interests of our employees;
• our need to foster relationships with suppliers, customers and others;
• the impact of our operations on the community and the environment;
• our desire to maintain a reputation for high standards of business conduct.

Our Values
We believe that organisations can have a positive social impact, and that
careers should have purpose and meaning. Our goal is to change the world
for the better – one appointment at a time. We’ve given a lot of thought to how
we want to do business. It boils down to five core values.
Partnership
We work in genuine partnership with our clients, remaining communicative and transparent
throughout the appointment process. We’re also a close-knit team, not just a collection of
individuals. We collaborate and share expertise across sector boundaries.
Authenticity
We’re not ‘salesy’. We ensure that our clients meet the colleagues who will actually lead our
work for them. We hire people who are genuine and personable. We value being trustworthy
and approachable.
Integrity
We treat people as people, not as a means to an end. We’re fair and straightforward in our
dealings with clients and candidates. We never ‘blag’. If we don’t know something then we’ll
admit it. We also seek to practise what we preach.
Creativity
Excellent search involves effective storytelling. We listen to nuance, put bespoke research into
every project, and think outside the box when sourcing great people. We’re also continually on the
lookout for innovative ways to use technology.
Diligence
We’re all about the details. We take in-depth briefings.
We follow up leads and leave no stone unturned when searching. We hold ourselves to the
highest quality standards. You can count on us to be thorough.

Our Strategy
Our business strategy is oriented around five key characteristics
we believe Society must embody in order to be successful:
Responsible
We must fully occupy the purpose-driven/responsible business space in our sector. We must take
our own impact seriously, ensuring we remain values-led and make a tangible positive contribution
to the world. This will ensure our work is meaningful and give us a powerful USP.
Connected
We must continually cultivate and refresh our knowledge, networks and relationships. We must
build our brand and our credibility to ensure that we are visible to leaders and to people in
positions of influence. This will make us a desirable partner for the clients we want to work with.
Global
We must internationalise our client portfolio, our colleague base, and our physical presence.
This will increase the reach of our positive impact, reduce our reliance on any one
geography/ economy, create career opportunities for our colleagues, and provide scope
for exciting innovations.
Diversified
We must diversify into new sectors and functional areas, expanding our expertise and capability.
We must widen our track record whilst also developing clear functional or thematic areas of
strength. This will protect us from over-reliance on any one colleague or sector.
Excellent
We must ensure that we have first-class systems, processes, and quality benchmarks, executed
consistently, and underpinned by high levels of productivity and accountability. We must collect and
utilise data to improve our performance. This will give us a vital competitive edge.

Business Performance
2019 was a challenging year commercially, with some significant headwinds;
not least the unrest in Hong Kong, where a large number of our Hospitality and
Leisure clients are headquartered. Ongoing Brexit-related uncertainty in the UK
also resulted in a noticeable reduction in job moves and mid-level restructures.
That was problematic, as we depend on a certain level of ‘churn’ at this stratum
of the employment market from a commercial perspective. We consequently
saw the overall volume of our work located in our country of origin shrink.
Nevertheless, we were able to achieve a meaningful increase in both the
proportion and total number of UK assignments that we were working on at
CEO or Non-Executive level, and the links made during those processes
arguably bode well for future years.
Outside the UK, our growth has been strong. The US business returned to profitability, having won
a string of big assignments right at the end of 2018, including the Executive Director of Médecins
Sans Frontières. We also handled work in Egypt, Australia, and Pakistan, and had colleagues
attending conferences as far afield as Kuala Lumpur and San Francisco.
In December’s bi-annual staff survey it was encouraging to see 100% of colleagues either agreeing
or strongly agreeing with the statement “I feel proud of working for Society”. It seems likely that this
is a direct result of the many initiatives outlined in this document. But 2019 was also a year where
we invested quite heavily again in both technology and people.
On the technology front, we have finally made the transition to SharePoint and OneDrive, giving
us an infrastructure far better suited to remote working, global offices, and allowing colleagues to
remain productive whilst on the road.
On the people front, we have hired three new senior colleagues, adding some needed ballast
and experience to the key parts of team. We have also invested in increasing our management
competencies, running all line managers in the company through a ten-week internal programme,
culminating in a team off-site day in Brixton during July that received very positive feedback.

The Society Foundation
The Society Foundation is an independent charity we helped to set up in 2014.
We fund it with an annual donation, equal to at least 10% of our profits. In
2019 it gave out five grants to organisations that help potentially vulnerable
people into paid employment.
The Society Foundation typically offers ‘microgrants’ to small or growing
organisations with a turnover of up to £500,000. The beneficiaries it seeks to
prioritise include the recently homeless or vulnerably housed, ex-offenders, and
16-24 year olds not in employment, education or training (NEETs).
CARAS
SUPPORTING DIVERSITY
CHALLENGING ADVERSITY
CARAS
Location: South West London
Grant: £1,400
CARAS (Community Action for Refugees and
Asylum Seekers) is a community outreach charity
that supports refugees and asylum seekers in South
West London. Their grant will allow them to purchase
of two laptops and the associated IT set-up. This
would enhance the digital literacy skills, and thus the
employability, of hundreds of young people in the
years to come.
CARNEY’S COMMUNITY
Location: Wandsworth, London
Grant: £1,500
Carney’s works to improve the social mobility of
disadvantaged youths through mentoring schemes.
The grant will allow them to cover the costs of the
chief executive training course at the CASS Business
School, indirectly improving the organisation’s
strategic and programmatic delivery.

CIRCLE COMMUNITY
Location: East London
Grant: £1,140
Circle transforms the lives of disadvantaged
youths in East London by empowering them with
employability skills and hands-on work experience.
This grant would allow them to purchase video
cameras, SD Cards, tripods, digital monitors, and
wall brackets. This would enhance their mock
interview training programme.
FAITHWORKS WESSEX
Location: Dorset
Grant: £1,200
Faithworks Wessex partners with churches and
community groups in Dorset to help families in crisis
rebuild their lives. The grant will be used to purchase
carpentry and IT tools to improve their skills training
workshop capabilities.
ENTERPRISE HOMES GROUP
Location: Wolverhampton
Grant: £400
Enterprise Homes supports homeless individuals
in Wolverhampton by providing accommodation
services and training in personal presentation
and employability skills. This partial grant would
contribute towards the partitioning and optimisation
of their office space, allowing them to create more
efficient training areas.

Becoming a B Corporation
In March 2019, Society was proud and excited to become
a certified B Corporation, taking our place alongside a
global community of companies that are committed to
being a force for good.
To become a B Corp, every aspect of our business had to be assessed
and audited in order to ensure that we meet rigorous standards of social
and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. We’ve
also changed our founding document – our Articles of Association – in
order to embed a legal accountability for our Board of Directors to think
holistically about Society’s impact on the wider world.
The B Corp designation was created by a global non-profit called B Lab, which began in the US but
now has a presence in 60 countries. B Lab administers the certification process for companies to
become, and to stay, B Corps. There are currently over 2,600 certified B Corporations across 150
industries, including brands such Ben and Jerry’s, Innocent, Cook, Café Direct, JoJo Maman Bébé,
Patagonia and Warby Parker.
Society’s Managing Director, Simon Lucas, commented:
“When we set up Society nearly ten years ago, our goal was to build a
different type of executive search firm – one that would hold to the highest
ethical standards, and successfully combine profit with purpose. B Corp
certification is a celebration of what we’ve achieved. We’re particularly
delighted to have been granted certification at the first attempt. However
this is also a reminder of the ways in which we can improve. We look
forward to working with, and learning from, our fellow B Corps in order
to keep enhancing Society’s impact.”

Declaring a Climate Emergency
It might sound a bit pretentious or grandiose for an executive search firm to
“declare” a climate emergency. But that’s what Society has decided we need to
do. We feel obligated to speak out and to take action.
Society is committing to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions
to ‘Net Zero’ by 2030.
We don’t have big factories to overhaul, or
complex supply chains to marshal. However,
even for us, this commitment will present
significant challenges. We will need to
reimagine certain aspects of our business
model. That is partly because we are
determined the word “Net” shouldn’t end up
doing all the heavy lifting. Companies mustn’t
fool themselves that simply offsetting their
carbon footprint can provide the whole
solution. There are only so many trees the
world can plant. Meanwhile, many of the
approaches for subtracting carbon from the
atmosphere currently remain unproven.
We feel we actually need to reduce our
footprint as well.
Here is the approach we plan to take:
• we will calculate and report our
estimated annual greenhouse gas
emissions inventory (our ‘carbon
footprint’) compliant with the
Greenhouse Gas Protocol;
• we will look at ways to minimise our use
of carbon-intensive travel, particularly
air travel;
• we will regularly review all energy
and water usage and our waste
management arrangements;
• we will support and encourage our
employees to change their individual
behaviour, including switching to
renewable energy at home, using more
public transport, cycling and walking,
reducing food waste, eating less meat and
dairy, and taking an active interest in
where their pensions are invested;
• we will try to identify ways of pursuing
shared solutions with our clients, our
suppliers and even our competitors;
• we will consider new ways to use
our purchasing power to affect
positive change.
• we will then develop a series of carbon
reduction targets/milestones and begin
reporting on them annually;

Volunteering
Throughout 2019, Society’s colleagues continued to volunteer their time and
expertise to a range of organisations across London and New York.
Volunteering an excellent way of recharging our batteries and contributing
to team building, but it also allows us to forge meaningful and long-lasting
partnerships with our communities. We’re pleased to have seen an increasingly
diverse range of activities undertaken recently.
In total we spent more than 350 hours volunteering during 2019. Some examples from across the
UK and US include:
• sorting clothing donations at a British Heart Foundation shop in Clacton;
• running a workshop about interview skills and techniques for young people from Hackney;
• judging an award scheme for young people aged 9-21 undertaking work experience in
leading UK engineering firms;
• preparing and serving hot meals for the elderly people in London’s Elephant and Castle area;
• facilitating workshops for young people in South London about gender norms and masculinity.
Our Company Away Day
In April, Society’s UK team spent the day at Kentish Town City Farm undertaking a collection of
manual tasks including gardening, chopping up old Christmas trees, fence building, and painting.
We also met some very playful goats!
Meanwhile, in New York, our colleagues spent the day with two organisations: first, in Brooklyn
with FABSCRAP, an organisation that recycles fabrics in New York City, and second, with The
Bowery Mission, serving hot meals to those experiencing homelessness in Manhattan.
Board Responsibilities
Society also has colleagues who are governors at schools in Essex and Hitchin and trustees of
charities in London. We are encouraging and supportive of colleagues who have long-term
voluntary commitments and board-level roles, as it’s a great way to develop inclusive and
innovative leaders within our firm.

Health and Wellbeing
In 2018, we concentrated our efforts in this area predominantly on the
challenges of mental ill health in the workplace. Encouragingly, when we
received our most recent set of results from the Britain’s Healthiest Workplace
Survey, we could see a noticeable improvement in this area. As such, for 2019,
we opted to broaden our focus, launching several new initiatives and generally
taking a more holistic perspective.
Highlights from our Health and Wellbeing programme over the past year have included:
workshops for all
colleagues on
techniques to improve
emotional resilience
PARTICIPATING IN A
FUNDRAISING COMPETITION
CALLED STEPtember, AIMED
AT ENCOURAGING ACTIVE
LIFESTYLES, AND
COLLECTIVELY COMPLETING
4,633,150 STEPS WHILST
RAISING $210 FOR CYSTIC
FIBROSIS RESEARCH
getting our first
colleague trained and
certified as a Mental
Health First Aider
holding
weekly mindfulness
meditation sessions
(and a whole-company
meditation at the start
of November’s Company
Away Day, led by
a professional
mindfulness consultant)
organising our second
charity run during
the summer
using the Utrecht Work
Engagement Scale to
explore with colleagues
some of their ideas for
how we create a
workplace that
encourages the
maximum amount of
vigour, dedication
and absorption.

Personal and Professional Development
At the beginning of 2019, we held a Dragon’s Den-style consultation process
in which colleagues were invited to pitch for a particular change they’d like
to make to Society’s working arrangements and policies. We hoped some
interesting new ideas would surface which would have the effect of improving
colleague wellbeing while also boosting productivity and engagement levels.
We’ve been able to implement several of the
fantastic ideas that came out of this session
over the course of the year. One of these is a
new Personal and Professional Development
Allowance, whereby each colleague will be
given up to £250 to be spent on training or
other enrichment activities. This could be put
towards a short course, some language
learning software, a subscription to the
Headspace app, or essentially anything the
colleague in questions feels would be valuable.
It’s up to each individual to spend it how they
see fit. Although some loose form of
‘return on investment’ for the company is
expected, this is mostly about providing the
means through which colleagues can develop
new skills, achieve greater balance in their
lives, and feel more engaged in their work.
We’re excited to see how colleagues
choose to develop
themselves in 2020!

Diversity Monitoring
As a firm, Society is deeply committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. To be
clear, this isn’t about tokenism, quotas, or box-ticking. Our starting point is
simply that diversity is a good thing. It’s a source of strength. It’s something
organisations should be prepared to fight for. By drawing on the widest
possible range of experience and talents, diverse organisations are able to
make better decisions, and typically have fewer strategic blind-spots. That
makes them ultimately more stable and more successful.
We are always trying to find new ways to innovate in this space, and have begun to develop a
series of additional services that we are incorporating into our standard process.
Starting in October, we are now able to produce written reports for clients at the conclusion of our
searches, showing the aggregate profile of the candidates who applied in relation to each of the
following ten characteristics.
ethnicity
gender
age
disability
sexual
orientation
religion/belief
higher
education
experience
caring
responsibilities
veteran status
criminal record
Crucially, this information is kept strictly anonymous - even from us. We collect it by asking
every candidate we interact with to complete a diversity monitoring questionnaire. You can
view an example here. And although candidates are under no obligation to comply, we are
finding that most do, partly because of our promise to donate 25p (GBP) to charity for every
complete response.

Ongoing Commitments
We believe that being a responsible business is about going on a journey
rather than reaching a destination. Every year we are looking for new ways to
improve, but we also try to hold on to what we’ve put in place already. Here’s a
summary of our journey to date:
Purpose and
mission defined
Volunteering
entitlement for
all colleagues
Charitable gifts
for all placed
candidates
Annual
whole-company
volunteering days
Weekly ‘TED
Time’ sessions
for all colleagues
Work
experience
scheme
National sponsor of
Give & Gain Day for
two years
Five company
values codified
‘Steering
Wheel’
introduced
Fun Officer
roles created
Stakeholder
interests codified
Environmental
impacts codified

Printing
monitoring
introduced
Payroll Giving
introduced
Prompt Payment
Code signed
Voluntary Code of
Conduct signed
UKVI
sponsored
employer
status attained
Flexible Hours
Policy introduced
Personal bins
removed
Society
Foundation
launched
Free fruit
in the office
Cycle to
Work scheme
Careers at Society
framework codified
Working Forward
Pledge signed
Key
Strategy Community Marketplace Workplace
and Wellbeing
Environment

Ongoing Commitments
We believe that being a responsible business is about going on a journey
rather than reaching a destination. Every year we are looking for new ways to
improve, but we also try to hold on to what we’ve put in place already. Here’s a
summary of our journey to date:
Accredited Living
Wage Employer
4pm stretches
introduced
50 training
sessions codified
Health and
Wellbeing Officer
role created
Summer
BBQ yoga
introduced
Time to Change
pledge signed
Dogs allowed
in the office
GDPR and
BreatheHR
introduced
Wellness Action
Plans for all
colleagues
Mental health
training for
managers
Parental leave
report published
Entered into
Britain’s Healthiest
Workplace survey

Articles of
Association
changed
Working from
home expanded to
all colleagues
Responsibility
made an explicit
strategic priority
Friday
meditation
sessions
introduced
B Corp
certification
achieved
CR Committtee
created
All past
appointments
coded in
relation to the
SDGs
Climate
emergency
declared
More
sustainable
office space
identified
Net Zero target
announced
Mental health
first aiding
introduced
Diversity monitoring
solution goes live
Personal and
Professional
Development
Allowances
introduced
Company Away
Day meditation
introduced
Key
Strategy Community Marketplace Workplace
and Wellbeing
Environment

Looking Ahead
Here are some of the projects we are looking forward to tackling in 2020:
• undertaking an office move in Q1 to
provide more scope for biophilic
design, expanded communal areas,
and shower facilities;
• fitting out the new office in a more
sustainable way (eg. switching to LED
lightbulbs, which consume up to 80%
less energy compared to traditional
incandescent bulbs);
• expanding our office recycling facilities to
include batteries, glass, printer toner,
fluorescent tubes and lightbulbs;
• implementing new Workplace Health and
Wellbeing, Childcare, Environmental, and
Responsible Procurement policies;
• calculating our baseline emissions and
then creating a detailed plan to get us to
Net Zero by 2030;
• going plant-based and locally-sourced for
all Society events;
• getting rid of our office Nespresso
machine and switching to a B Corp
coffee supplier;
• launching a more holistic Health and
Wellbeing framework which will
encompass current areas of weakness such
as encouragement and support around
sleep and activity;
• working towards our B Corp
re-certification with a target score of 95+;
• educating colleagues on the power of their
pensions (eg. according to the FT, only 5%
of the UK’s biggest corporate pension
funds, which collectively oversee £479
billion in assets, have a policy on
climate change).
• finalising our implementation of Personal
and Professional Development Allowances;

If you’re interested in learning more about Society, we’d love to hear
from you. Please contact us on hello@society-search.com or via one
of our offices:
Society Europe
Society North America
The Johnson Building
404 5th Avenue
77 Hatton Garden Floor 7: 0ffice 030
London
New York
EC1N 8JS 10018
United Kingdom
United States
+44 (0)207 935 4052 +1 (917) 882 9827