CSR Officer

The core of this role sits at the intersection of environmental compliance and CSR coordination. You'll be the person maintaining the group's environmental register, coordinating the annual carbon footprint assessment, from data collection across the different agencies to calculation and final reporting, and preparing for certification audits tied to EMAS, ISO 14001 and B Corp. On top of that, you'll track CSR indicators and help produce the annual CSR report, which means turning scattered operational data into something coherent and publishable. Beyond the compliance spine of the job, there's a genuinely cross-functional layer. VO's event, European and creative agencies will lean on you when tenders or client projects carry CSR criteria, so part of your week goes to supporting bid teams, checking supplier and partnership commitments, and contributing to the My Impact Tool, the group's own impact measurement instrument. Longer term, the mission is to make sustainability something VO's teams don't have to think about because it's already built into how they work. That means internal awareness initiatives, improving the quality of the data feeding the reports, and gradually moving the group from compliance-driven reporting toward genuinely strategic impact management.

Because this is a small CSR team inside a mid-sized communications group, the learning curve is likely steep and unusually broad. You'd gain hands-on fluency in the mechanics of EMAS, ISO 14001 and B Corp, not just the theory of the standards, but how audits are actually prepared, what evidence auditors look for, and how non-conformities get resolved. That kind of practical certification exposure is rare at this career stage and highly transferable. You'd also build real competence in carbon accounting: collecting activity data across offices and event sites, applying factors, and defending the resulting numbers. Working with the My Impact Tool would add a second, less common skill set around impact measurement for events and communications work, which is a growing niche. On the softer side, the cross-functional nature of the role means exposure to tenders, procurement, supplier relations and internal engagement, all areas that round out a CSR profile beyond purely environmental reporting. If you're early-career, mentorship from the two colleagues in the team and direct visibility with management could accelerate your growth considerably.

The profile VO is sketching looks like someone with a degree in sustainability, environment or CSR and a first meaningful experience, an internship counts, in environmental compliance or CSR reporting. The decisive factor is probably familiarity with certification frameworks such as EMAS or ISO 14001, because those carry fixed deadlines and require the kind of rigour that can't be improvised. Language is non-negotiable: French and English are used daily, so genuine bilingual comfort in written and spoken form matters more here than in many Brussels roles. Strong Excel skills are equally important, since carbon accounting and KPI tracking live in spreadsheets. A service mindset is explicitly requested: this is a support function to the wider group, not a standalone policy shop. Nice-to-haves include Dutch, exposure to the events or communications sector, experience with carbon or impact measurement tools, and a personal interest in B Corp. The posting is explicit that ticking every box isn't required, which suggests they value aptitude and motivation alongside credentials, someone curious and organised may well beat someone with a longer CV but less appetite.

Since they ask for a CV plus a few lines on what draws you to the role, those few lines carry disproportionate weight. Rather than generic enthusiasm for sustainability, connect your motivation to something specific about VO: the events context, the "Today, for tomorrow" positioning, or the challenge of making impact measurable in a creative business where outputs are intangible. On the CV, foreground anything that touches certification, audit preparation, carbon data or CSR reporting, even coursework or a university project on EMAS or ISO 14001 is worth naming explicitly. If you have Excel-heavy experience, quantify it (reporting models built, data sets managed). If you speak Dutch, make it visible; it's listed as a plus and Brussels employers often under-rate how much it helps. Expect questions in the interview about how you handle fixed deadlines and regulatory detail, and possibly a practical exercise involving data or a fictional compliance scenario. It's also worth preparing a view on how sustainability applies to events and communications, travel, energy, waste, but also the influence a communications group has on its clients' behaviour. Showing you've thought about that second layer will differentiate you.

The role's centre of gravity is environmental compliance and certification. VO holds itself out as a purpose-driven group with an environmental policy, a DEI policy and repeated recognition for positive impact, and this position exists to give those commitments an auditable backbone: the environmental register, the carbon footprint, and the EMAS, ISO 14001 and B Corp processes all flow through it. A second focus area is the group's own impact measurement, embodied in the My Impact Tool. For a business built on events and communication campaigns, quantifying impact is genuinely hard, so contributing to that tool means shaping how VO defines, tracks and eventually reports the difference its work makes, a governance-adjacent task as much as an environmental one. There's also a clear social and commercial dimension. By supporting tenders and client projects with CSR criteria, the role helps embed sustainability into the group's revenue-generating work, which is where corporate responsibility either becomes real or stays decorative. Supplier and partnership monitoring adds a scope 3-flavoured, value-chain angle to what might otherwise be an internal compliance job.

The most obvious challenge is the tension between a three-person team and a group-wide mandate. VO spans three agencies plus a European operation, so collecting reliable data from busy event and creative teams, people whose primary job is not sustainability, will require tact and persistence. Deadlines tied to certifications don't move, even when colleagues are mid-event. A second challenge is the events context itself. Event-based businesses have notoriously diffuse footprints, with significant emissions and impacts sitting with suppliers, venues and travel rather than in controlled operations. Measuring that accurately, and defending the numbers during an audit, is materially harder than reporting on a fixed office estate. The My Impact Tool presumably exists partly because of this difficulty, and improving it will be iterative rather than clean. Finally, the role sits in a support function, which can mean limited authority over the very processes it must report on. Navigating that (persuading rather than instructing, and building credibility with teams that see CSR criteria as an extra hurdle in tenders) is likely as important as the technical work itself.

A typical day probably splits between data and people. Mornings might go to the less glamorous foundations: updating the environmental register, chasing missing figures for the carbon footprint, refining an Excel model, or preparing documentation ahead of a certification audit. Because the team is only three people, blocks of uninterrupted analytical time matter and you'd likely protect them. Interspersed with that, you'd be responding to colleagues across VO Event, VO Europe and The Little Voice, someone needs CSR input for a tender, a supplier's commitments need verifying, or a project team wants to understand what a client's sustainability criteria actually require. Internal awareness work, whether preparing a short briefing or supporting an initiative, also sits in this layer. Contact with the two other CSR team members would be constant, and there'd likely be periodic check-ins with management given the visibility of the certification work. The rhythm is probably punctuated rather than uniform: quieter periods of data consolidation give way to intense stretches around annual reporting, audit preparation or major tender submissions. Brussels-based with flexibility on work organisation, some remote work seems plausible, though audit and team-collaboration moments would pull you on site.

The clearest growth vector is deep technical mastery of environmental certification and carbon accounting. Owning EMAS, ISO 14001 and B Corp processes end to end at this stage builds a CV that maps directly onto sustainability manager and ESG reporting roles in larger organisations. Certification expertise is a durable, portable skill, and having run audits rather than merely observed them is a genuine differentiator. Inside VO, the trajectory could go two ways. With a three-person team, there's room to grow into more senior ownership of the CSR agenda, potentially leading one of the two pillars or eventually the function itself if the team expands. Alternatively, the cross-functional exposure (tenders, impact measurement, internal engagement) opens lateral paths into business development with a sustainability angle, or into the product side of the My Impact Tool if it grows. Less formally, the visibility of the role matters. Certification and annual reporting put you in contact with senior stakeholders across the group, and the group's public positioning on positive impact means strong CSR performance is noticed. For someone early in their career, that combination of technical depth and internal exposure is a strong foundation to build on.

Your closest stakeholders are the two colleagues in the three-person CSR team, with whom you'd share the certification, reporting and project workload daily. Beyond that, you'd interact regularly with management, given that audits and the annual CSR report are group-level commitments that leadership will care about directly. The broadest set of relationships is internal and cross-functional: project and bid teams across VO Event, VO Europe and The Little Voice who need CSR input for tenders and client work, plus whoever holds the operational data (finance, facilities, HR) that feeds the carbon footprint, KPI tracking and environmental register. Because you're a support function, these are relationships you influence rather than direct, which shapes how you work with them. Externally, you'd likely engage with certification bodies and auditors during EMAS, ISO 14001 and B Corp processes, and with suppliers, partners and venues whose responsible commitments you help monitor. There may also be contact with clients or prospects where CSR criteria feature in tenders, though usually via the relevant project team rather than directly.