The sustainability jobs market is a multi-faceted story. The 2026 Sustainability Census from Acre and SLR, which surveyed 2,340 professionals in 76 countries, found that nearly two-thirds had seen budgets rise or hold steady, and more than half said their team size had not changed (as summarised by Impactpool). On paper, that is a steady market.
However, when we delve a little deeper, the picture rapidly changes. LinkedIn’s latest green skills data shows green hiring growing at 7.7% a year, while the number of people with those skills is growing at only 4.3%. The hiring rate for green-skilled workers runs 46.6% above the wider workforce, and in the US the share of green hires is rising by 8.9% a year (ESG Today).
The point we keep coming back to in our own search work is that the shortage is not spread evenly. Plenty of people can describe a sustainability strategy. Far fewer can do the technical, regulated or commercially sensitive parts of it. Those are the briefs that are hardest to fill, and they cluster in a handful of places.
Scope 3 and carbon data
Scope 1 and 2 emissions are, for most organisations, a solved problem. Scope 3 is not. It depends on supplier data that is patchy, estimated or missing, and it asks one person to be part analyst, part procurement specialist and part diplomat. Expertise in measuring and reducing Scope 1 to 3 emissions is one of the most sought-after technical capabilities on the market; candidates who have it are still commanding salary increases, while pay elsewhere has levelled off.
What's interesting to note is that these people don't usually have 'sustainability' in their job title. The strongest candidates for carbon data roles often sit in finance, supply chain or data teams, and have picked up the carbon work simply because someone had to. Recruiters elsewhere are seeing the same thing, with hybrid roles such as carbon data analyst and sustainable procurement manager becoming more common.
Climate risk in financial services
Banks, insurers and asset managers need people who can turn climate scenarios into numbers a risk committee will trust. That demands a rare mix of quantitative modelling, climate science literacy and regulatory awareness. Risk.net reported that global banks were competing for an insufficient talent pool, and that simply redeploying existing quants did not always give them the expertise they needed. One head of climate modelling said five of the 15 offers he had signed in a year were later turned down for better ones.
That report is now a couple of years old, but nothing we have seen since suggests the pool has deepened. If anything, the profile has become more demanding, because model risk and validation teams now expect climate overlays to meet the same standard as any other model.
Human rights due diligence
The EU has scaled back its Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, but the work has not gone away. Investor expectations, customer audits, forced labour import rules and modern slavery reporting all still need people who can map risk deep into a supply chain and act on what they find.
We have written before about the growing demand for human rights professionals, and our view has not changed. Organisations are struggling to find people who can work across law, operations and ethics at the same time, and human rights knowledge is no longer confined to CSR teams. The briefs we see increasingly ask for formal training in human rights due diligence, comfort with data, and real experience in high-risk regions or sectors. Languages such as Arabic, French, Spanish and Mandarin can tip the balance (our skills guide covers this in more detail).
The gap is wider still outside the specialist function. Engineers, buyers and logistics managers make the day-to-day decisions that create human rights risk, yet they rarely receive training to spot modern slavery or Scope 3 issues.
Finance teams that speak sustainability
The most underrated shortage may actually be in finance. EY’s corporate reporting research found that only 29% of finance leaders believe their teams have the skills for sustainability reporting (Eco-Business). Very few accounting degrees teach scenario analysis, Scope 3 accounting or ESG assurance.
This is a critical point, because the reporting work is changing shape rather than disappearing. As GRI’s chief executive Robin Hodess put it, companies are not going to be reporting less in the future. Reporting roles are turning into data-quality and assurance roles, and the people who suit them best combine a controller’s discipline with a working knowledge of sustainability standards. In our experience that combination is genuinely rare, and it is often more valuable to an organisation than another strategy hire.
The middle of the market
Shortages are not only about niche skills; seniority also comes into play. Typically, mid-level roles are the hardest to fill, with adviser and manager level roles being strongly candidate-led.
Sustainability has one of the highest staff turnover rates within the corporate governance sphere; candidates often cite limited progression and pay as the main reasons for moving on. We looked at why sustainability talent leaves in a blog earlier this year, and the pattern is consistent: people at this level have options, and they use them.
What this means if you are hiring
A few practical points follow from all of this.
- Hire for the skill, not the title. The word “ESG” now appears in just 12.5% of sustainability job titles globally, down from 15% in 2024, and only 5.6% in the US (Impactpool). Searching on titles will miss many of the people you want.
- Look sideways. More than half of green-skilled hires in 2025 went into roles with no sustainability title. Finance, procurement, risk and engineering are all fertile ground, and 75% of employers in the Hays survey said they would hire someone without every skill and train them.
- Go to the passive market. The specialists in these areas are usually already in post, well rewarded and not reading job adverts. In our searches, the best candidates for carbon, climate risk and due diligence roles are almost never the ones who applied.
- Move quickly and pay realistically. Losing a third of signed offers, as one bank did, is what happens when good candidates have a choice. A slow process is a cost in itself.
- Plan for retention from day one. A clear route to progression is often worth as much as salary to people in the middle of their careers.
A personal observation
When a sustainability search runs long, that is rarely down to a lack of applicants. It is usually a specific request that asks for a carbon accountant, a supply chain auditor and a board-level communicator in one person. Those people do exist, but there are very few of them. The organisations that hire well in this market identify which scarce skills are most essential to their function, and then build the rest of their team around it.
For further information on the ESG, Sustainability and Human Rights hiring market or to discuss current job openings, please contact Adam Bond.
