This is very cool, and not only because I’m on the judging panel. 
The In-house Recruitment Awards are open to in-house recruitment teams, obliviously, but also to the advertising agencies representing in-house teams that are proud of the work they have achieved. From what we’ve heard from the organisers, there has been overwhelming interest from advertising agencies, hoping to showcase their best work at this years awards.
Recent entries include:
ITV, TESCO, EXPERT COMMS, DANONE, THREE, CLARKS, WRAGGE & CO, NATIONAL TRUST, LV =, ADMIRAL, FITFLOP, COMPASS GROUP, SAGE, OMNICOM, EUROMONEY, SAVE THE CHILDREN, TULLO MARSHALL WARREN, HJ HEINZ, DIRECT LINE GROUP, SAPIENT NITRO, WIN TECHNOLOGIES, FT, KETCHUM PLEON, HYUNDAI, BOOTS, MINTEL GROUP LTD, EUROSTAR, FUTURE PUBLISHING, SSP (UK), INCISIVE MEDIA, TEMENOS
Entry is completely FREE and you can enter as many awards as you like including, Best In-house Recruitment Team, Best In-house Recruitment Website, Best In-house Recruitment Manager plus 11 others.
Download your entry form here: http://goo.gl/qhFrr
Or for more information go to: http://InHouseRecruitmentAwards.co.uk
The guys at OMJ always put on a great night and the In-house Recruitment Awards will be no exception, so get your entry forms in now!
Oh Lord fella! Not another set of meaningless awards? Tell you what, why don’t we just have a weekly awards ceremony so that everyone can get to receive a gong of some sort. Better still, just give everyone a gold star like they used to at school. Life isn’t about getting recognition fella, it’s about being good at what you do and doing it because you like doing it, not because you so desperately want to win a trophy. At the end of the day they mean very little. I mean, come on fella, look at G4S. Recruitment personality of the year and, only last May, best recruitment technology in the world apparently and yet they couldn’t recruit enough spotty herberts to search people’s handbags at the games. See what I mean fella? Awards mean zilcheroony. Just do a good job and let that be your satisfaction
Sorry fella, I’ve always found it difficult to take anyone that uses an online alias seriously. It’s a free world and you can post what you like here, but if you’re trying to make a point, which you are, believe in your convictions and use your real name, fella.
OK – I’ll put my hand up and echo the sentiments of DaveGoesItAlone and am happy to be public about it if that’s what you’re looking for I’m regard to validity of an opinion.
FACT: Awards ceremonies are most often purely commercial enterprises hung around (and effectively sold by leveraging) one of the basest of human traits – namely ego.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been fortunate enough over the years to have worked in a creatively acclaimed and highly awarded ad agency, as well as having personally picked up awards for work I’ve been involved in too, and it feels great to have something you can point at that embodies “recognition” – it certainly gives you something to crow about to new business, pump up your cv with and generally try and inflate your worth with. But with all the best written promotional sentiments aimed at generating a perceived need, justification or validity , at the end of the day where it really comes down to is creating an opportunity to then sell tables at an event.
Of course there’ll be submissions left right and centre because a trophy is a trophy (& there’s no cost of submission for this particular awards either) – and if you’ve done the work then hell, why not see if you can’t get something to put in reception or on your filing cabinet that proves just how good you were thought to be by a bunch of people for something that you did (or in many cases perhaps even just said you did). Certainly there’ll be agencies left right an centre wanting to see if they can get some PR or additional client love from a short listed piece of work at £0 cost of entry.
“Dave” is absolutely right to also point out just how easy it is to see the flawed nature of this awards ceremony commercial gold rush in the current world when you look back at the headlines over the past month and contrast this against the multitude of awards and accolade that G4S soaked up over the last year for what was fundamentally and so publicly proven to be a flawed and failed recruitment campaign. Never before has so much humiliation been heaped on a single recruitment activity so widely and blatantly prematurely heralded as such a success.
It also strikes me as interesting that when you look at the judges only one (to my knowledge) has any in-house recruitment experience at all, and it’s certainly only Gary who’s working in that space currently. I do get that the rest of the panel will almost certainly have valid opinions and wide experience to bring to the debate and considerations, but it seems to me it’s more of a sponsors roll call than the panel of peers that I would expect to add the perspective of operational reality to such deliberations, as well as adding integrity to the outcome. And upon what criteria will these judges be evaluating entrants? That’s pretty important too tbh.
So I’m sorry to strike such a cynical tone – I don’t doubt it will be a very enjoyable night and an award is always nice to get, particularly when those submitting entries have worked so hard in doing what they do – but whilst “Dave” is particularly blunt in his anonymous and flippantly humorous pop at these awards, I think that there is definitely merit in his underlying observations that shouldn’t be brushed off by (understandable) pointing out the reduced credibility of anonymous postings.
Thanks Alex. I sort of agree with a lot of what you’ve said, and what Dave said for that matter. The key issues here seem to be:
- Commercialistion of award ceremonies in our industry
- Credibility of the judging panel
- Potential credibility of the winners (G4S example)
Let me touch on each.
Commercialisation – This isn’t limited to these awards, or even our industry. The RADs, which are this industries Oscars, apparently, are a commercial business. They make a shed load of money on that night and charge through the roof prices because they know ad agencies wont want to be sitting at home watching Eastenders whilst their clients get wined and dinned by another agency. Agencies go to kiss their clients asses, the media go to kiss the ad agencies asses and somewhere in the middle they charge £25,000 to have your logo appear on the big screen and £200 a seat for dry chicken and half a bottle of Prosecco. If the commercialisation of awards nights are an issue, you need to widen that that brush. The Oscars charge $1m a minute for advertising during that show, BTW.
Judging Panel – I agree, I would have liked to see more people doing the job judging other people doing the job, if that makes sense. What right do I have to judge a piece of work from an in-house recruitment team? Very little, having never worked in-house before, but it was an honor to be asked and, I can’t speak for my fellow judges, but I’m certainly not sponsoring the night. I will say that looking at the panel there will be points made from several different angles, so maybe that’s what they were going for? The RADs are judged by a mix of employers, ad agencies and suppliers. The Oscars are judged by critics, not actors. Again, I think this is an issue with awards nights over all.
Credibility of the Winners – G4S won an award and then what happened happened. Fine. At the time, I’m pretty sure they had no idea that was going to happen, but I will agree, they should have waiting until after the games before making such a song and dance about how great they were. But that said, I could give you 20 examples of recruitment adverts that have won RAD awards that never got a single response, or at least didn’t do the job it was intended to do. Alex, having worked for an agency, have you never had a client say to you “We don’t care if it gets any response, we want to win an award”? If you’re shaking your head right now, you’re in the minority. So what’s the difference? It’s still winning an award for not performing. The biggest issue we have is that most awards are subjective. Until we have an award where it can be transparently demonstrated that something did the job it was meant to do, better than anything else, awards nights like these will forever be questioned.
I think both of your issues here are not specific to this awards night, or the “gold rush” of awards night recently, they seemed more aimed at award nights in general, and I completely agree if that is the case. However, until someone shows me a viable alternative, I’m happy to support and contribute to events like this, because if nothing else, it gives people something to moan about.
As always, I love hearing your views Mr Hens.
Sorry for the delay in continuing this debate, just been one hell of a summer / year. Anyway, used a flight to Boston as an opportunity to catch up and this came back into my sights
Commercialism – I know it’s here. that was a lesson I learned quite a few years ago as my naive bubble burst. This is not my core beef here, but merely an observation.
Judging credibility – I didn’t say that you had sponsored the event, I said it “read” like a sponsors list. People who might have an interest in being associated with the kind of people who were participating, not that you actually had provided funds to be included in the judging list. And as nice a straight talking guy as you are (and the other panellists too) I still think any such panel needs to be have a weighting that provides credibility. My impression is, for example, that in the RADs and CIPDs there’s a good mix of HR / Recruitment professionals and Creative / Agency types. And when you looks further afield to “proper advertising” then my impression is (as an outsider) that the fact that the judging panels are heavily skewed towards peers gives a massive level of credibility that will see the same campaign winning several times over the course of a year and across several different awards. At the end of the day if you’re clear about what your awards are about then you bring in the most appropriate people and integrity shouldn’t ever be in question.
Credibility of winners – the case of G4S is more relevant that you give credit to. If a creative campaign wins a RAD (other awards based, or largely based, on recognising creativity are available) then that’s on the basis of it being creatively engaging / pretty / clever. Admittedly sometimes such awards have looked to bolster their integrity and standing in the community, or else differentiate, through including consideration of “effectiveness”, but what’s required to prove such measurement is pretty clearly set out in the submission requirement. G4S were awarded accolades in regards to recruitment effectiveness and all-round being friking awesome – all of which proved to be as premature as a heterosexual teenage boy cupping his first breast. So if this award wants to try and establish any sort of credibility then I’d suggest establishing very clearly up front what’s being assessed and against what criteria it is that it’s / you’re (as a judge) assessing entrants. As far as I can see though that hasn’t happened. At all.
You are right in one thing though – my moan is not specific to this awards do. Just guess this was the one that seemed so blatantly commercialistic over perceptible integrity or even need that it broke this camels public opinion stating back :-]
Feedback is always appreciated so thanks for taking the time to debate the awards.
I’m delighted to say we’ve had 60 confirmed entries from companies including:
Admiral
Andsome
Anglia University
Apex Hotels
Bakkavor
Barclays UK Retail and Business Bank
Bates JPW
Blast Radius
Boots
Centrica
Clarks
Compass Group
Danone
Dennis Publishing
DHL
Direct Line Group
Epert Communications
Essence Digital
Euromoney
Eurostar
Fitflop
FT
Future Publishing
Guidence Navigation
Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust
HJ Heinz
Home Retail Group
House of Fraser
Hyundai
Incisive Media
ITV
Jagex
Jam Recruitment
Ketchum Pleon
LateRooms.com
LV=
Mintel Group Ltd
National Trust
Net Natives
O2 c/o Ochre House
Ochre House
Omnicom
Sage
Sapient Nitro
Save the Children
Shop Direct Group
Sodexo
Specsavers
SSP (UK)
Symantec
Temenos
Tesco
Three
TMP Worldwide
Tullo Marshall Warren
United Biscuits
Whitbread
Wragge & Co
Really? That’s how you respond? Listing names of companies / their agencies that will invest a tiny amount of time on being as creative as possible in their submission (probably largely copy and pasted from other award submissions) punting their work for the prospect of having accolade for winning some / any award – and specifically after I have suggested quite clearly that volume of submissions is no mark of an awards relevance as entrants have little real care for the (IMHO) deep rooted integrity gap of these awards and submit only on the basis of “a trophy is a trophy is a trophy”.
Well well done you for not even bothering to read my entry here – or else not having the integrity yourself or substance in your awards with which to counter. Unfortunately I think you have just exactly proved my point. That’s a shame :-{
Alex I was simply sharing the response of companies that clearly did think it worthwhile to be part of. As it happens we topped 75 companies – but then that doesn’t resonate with you. It has with many others though.
Anyway, why don’t we just agree to disagree for now and I’ll be happy to share the post awards feedback. Sorry, whilst I’d love to debate with you I do have so many other things to be getting on with.
Enjoy your week,
Mark
Hey Guys, some interesting views here, to say the least! Perhaps Alex’s concerns would be lessened if you were to publish the judging criteria so there is absolute transparency?
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh
Fascinating debate.
There are times when I am so tempted to join in these debates but bite my tongue.
Damn political correctness
I think that’s a really good idea Ken, and I’m sure OMJ would be happy to provide some clarity around it.
MJ, really? There’s a first for everything.