Destination Talent Awards 2010 – vote for Best Job Board, Recruitment Website and Careers Site

Two themes that have featured quite heavily on The Whiteboard this year have been online Job Boards and Recruitment Industry Awards.  Job Boards are an obvious source of interest to us in recruitment.  96% of Australian and New Zealand recruitment firms post jobs on job boards with 40.2% of talent hired or placed by recruiters being sourced through that channel.  Awards are also an important feature for an industry largely misunderstood by the wider business community and often overlooked as the prominent professional services offering that it is.

So today I’m happy to announce the joyous coming together of these two areas of interest for our industry.  For the first time the Destination Talent Job Board Awards will be featuring a New Zealand category, providing an award that will be sweet jam between the chunky slices of job board and industry awards bread…Ok that’s not one of my better analogies but I have a packed day ahead and really need to get this down!

 

Destination Talent is a hugely respected Australian resource centre for everything to do with recruitment and sourcing of talent.  Earlier this year Philip Tusing of Destination Talent published the Job Board Report 2010 which you can download here.  For those that  like to Tweet, you can follow @JobBoardAwards  @DTalent and @PhilipTusing for further insights.

Other awards for New Zealand include Best Innovation, Best Recruitment Agency Website and Best Employer Career Site.  These are great awards that I encourage you all to get behind.  The face and direction of recruitment is changing quickly.  Of course the essential elements of relationship building, influencing, negotiating and closing will remain the same, but the methods of reaching those stages are undergoing dramatic transformations.  I know of at least five household recruitment brands that have invested heavily in new websites this year and I am also seeing exciting developments coming from the internal recruitment sector by tying their career sites into social media and focussing more on employer branding techniques.

You can easily vote for your favourite job board here with only a couple of mandatory fields to fill in.  And you can go here to nominate your firm or company for best website / career site, as well as nominate for best innovation of 2010.

Australia has its own panel of judges for their awards but here in New Zealand Philip has assembled a crack panel of recruitment industry experts to sift through all of the nominations and decide on the eventual overall winners.  Jonny Wyles from Haines Attract, Kate Billing from Blacksmith and Richard Westney from KPMG will be joined by…*ahem*… me.  So come on you lot, let’s get behind these awards big time and make them a prize to be proud of.

Job Board voting ends on 23^rd January 2011 and entries for the Best Recruitment Website and Best Employer Careers Site close on 16^th January 2011.

Happy voting and good luck.

Winners (and losers?) from the 2010 Seek New Zealand Recruitment Awards

Seek’s annual 2010 Recruitment Awards were held at the Hilton in Auckland last Friday night but you’d be hard pressed to know anything about it unless you were actually there.  I’ve been keeping an eye out for a press release all week but there has been nothing on Seek’s actual website or any newsworthy site such as the Herald or Stuff.

One site did decide to pick up the release and publish it out there, so The Whiteboard would like to follow suit and publically list and congratulate this year’s winners:

The winning agencies in each category are:

Adecco Recruitment

Large Generalist Recruiter

1st Call Recruitment

Medium Generalist Recruiter

Select Recruitment & HR

Small Generalist Recruiter

Geneva Health

Large Specialist Recruiter

Parker Bridge

Medium Specialist Recruiter

Synergy Consulting

Small Specialist Recruiter

Potentia

IT Recruiter

 

Now I do wish to offer my sincerest congratulations to these winners – and also to Madison and Focus who became Seek Legends for having won the award three times – but is this really the cream of the New Zealand recruitment industry?  I can identify some firms on there that I certainly feel are well up there, but there are others I have never even heard of.

Regular readers of The Whiteboard will have seen some views and opinion on the Seek Awards in my post on August  5^th “SARAS – a credible award or just a popularity contest?”  I’m wondering if Seek are starting to come around to the same way of thinking because they certainly haven’t been singing from the rooftops about these latest winners.  Either that or they are purposefully playing it “low-key” after last year when the 2009 Winners and Finalists were announced to the Press roughly 2 hours before the awards actually took place (bit of a faux pas that took a distinct amount of excitement and anticipation out of the evening’s events).

As I wasn’t a finalist this year I wasn’t invited to the awards but luckily I had a mole in there who was sending out Tweets as the winners were announced.  This was actually quite exciting and I got to know the winners straight away without having to suffer all the whooping and hollering.

But it was another Tweet that I saw that I was quite surprised at.  It suggested that Anne-Marie Duff (GM of Seek NZ – well she was then – but it was her last day as she’s going to TVNZ as a Marketing Manager) took a bit of a playful swipe at Momentum during her intro speech and had a cheeky dig about the Stephen Wilce dodgy CV saga.  Apparently the comment was greeted with a second’s pause before the room exploded in great mirth and all-round points scoring against Momentum, all in front of a red-faced Anne-Marie.  I thought that was potentially a bit of an uncool comment as they are no doubt a large client of Seek, so I put out a Tweet of my own (from @JonathanRiceNZ):

“Is it true Anne-Marie from #Seek had a dig at Momentum in her speech at the Seek Awards?  Error of judgement?”

Well talk about opening a can of worms.  I mean I was only asking the question – not making a statement – but I was firmly rapped on the knuckles by Seek so I agreed to send out another Tweet advising my followers that it was untrue and Anne-Marie did not, in fact, say anything or make any reference at all to Momentum.

I was also informed that it was unfair on Anne-Marie as she had left Seek and couldn’t defend herself.  Well I’ve been thinking about this all week and decided that of course she has a chance to defend herself from my question-that-wasn’t-an-allegation-it-was-just-a-question-as-I-wasn’t-actually-there.  She can defend herself here, on The Whiteboard, by making a comment on this very post.

Of course anyone else who was there and also didn’t hear these comments can say so on here as well – and then I will be more than forthcoming with my apologies for having cast any aspersions in Seek’s direction whatsoever!

I have also found out that, all going well, a formal press release will be coming out in the early part of next week about the whole Momentum / Defence Force / Stephen Wilce saga – and I for one will be glad to hear an official statement at last.

SARAs – A Credible Award or just a Popularity Contest?

I have noted from a number of recruiter e-mail signatures received over the past couple of weeks that the Seek Annual Recruitment Awards are nearly upon us again, and marketing efforts have begun to elicit votes from job seekers.  This is a welcome thing for it presents an opportunity for us in the New Zealand recruitment industry to let our hair down a bit (especially as there is no Seek Blue Ball again this year) and celebrate the recruitment firms out there giving great service to their candidates.

Or is it?  You see, I have often wondered about the status and substance of these awards.  Are they really a useful indicator for potential clients of who is providing the best candidate care?  And would this actually succeed in swaying the opinion of a potential client towards a certain agency?

Or are they simply a popularity contest amongst the recruitment firms actually bothered to invest time and effort into a marketing campaign to get job seekers to vote for them?

For those of you who aren’t aware, the SARA’s are awarded to recruitment firms in different categories ranging from small, medium and large in size, to generalist, specialist or IT in nature.  The winners are determined by who gets the most votes from “job seekers” that determine that firm to be their favourite recruiter.  I put the inverted commas around job seekers because you don’t actually have to be a job seeker, you can be anyone with a computer that doesn’t contain a cookie identifying you as someone who has already voted.  The contest is also only open to the firms that choose to enter so it is does not provide complete industry coverage.

I look back at previous winners and finalists of the SARA’s in New Zealand and wonder whether they really are an award worth striving for, or if they might be a bit of a poisoned chalice?  I can see 5 or 6 of the previous finalists from the past couple of years who have now totally gone out of business.  OK we had a vicious recession to get through but clearly it was astute business practices and hard work that kept companies afloat, not the ownership of a SARA.

I also wonder where are some of New Zealand’s bigger brands and operators?  If you look at some of the larger advertisers from the Herald’s annual Career supplement – the likes of Momentum, Gaulter Russell, Numero, OCG, Robert Walters, H2R and Sheffield – they are nowhere to be seen at the SARA’s.  It might be presumption on my part but I am imagining these firms don’t even enter into the contest (and a look at their websites indicates a lack of marketing towards the awards).

I think the idea of having these awards is fantastic and I for one am really looking forward to the event (if I’m still invited after this).  But I just think that a SARA could be something to really covet, to really aspire to, and to proudly market to future potential clients, if they were a bit more than a simple popularity contest, powered by the most active marketers, from the firms that actually bother to enter.

ITCRA sponsor an award for CIO Magazine for “Excellence in IT Recruiting” (won by Absolute IT this year).  With these awards IT recruitment companies are assessed on a number factors ranging from client feedback to staff development and are assessed by an independent panel of industry experts – in this case Julie Mills of ITCRA (ex-RCSA President), Brett O’Riley, CEO of NZICT Group and Judy Speight, Executive Director of Accelerating Auckland.  Now here is an award that can be held up with pride in front of clients and candidates alike.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the SARA’s are a great idea and, despite the number of previous finalists who have struggled in recent years, there are also a number of winners and finalists who I have worked with extensively and recognize them to be outstanding operators and recruiters.  I just think the award itself lacks a little substance and credibility, especially without the entries of some of the other firms mentioned above.