Back in August, we wrote “And the loser is…” about how in recruitment awards you now only get to see the winning entry and none of the other nominations/shortlist/finalists/whichever. In recent award events, that situation has changed. Now you don’t even get to see anything about the winner. Apart from their logo. Oh, and the people who go up on stage to collect said awards. Brilliant. So what won? Why? Who knows. Does anyone care?
Now there’s always a huge appetite for case studies. Are award-winning entries not such evidence of successful practice, if they’ve been entered and judged properly? Especially as they’re judged by a panel of peers, rather than an organisation or agency’s take on their own project, aren’t these the shining examples that should be taken notice of? So why In-house Recruitment Awards and The Firm Awards have they been ‘hidden away’? The only people to take advantage of seeing the winning entries being the judges themselves. Great, eh?
One argument may be that the winners aren’t ‘visual’ but strategic or people based. So? Can a strategy not be demonstrated in more than a couple of lines on a website or a random link to the winning company’s career site. Plenty of the entries are visual, so what is the excuse for those? At least represent them in some way that shows and tells why they were the best.
Is winning all that matters nowadays? OK, let’s try this. Imagine if last year’s Olympics had been held behind closed doors. You just saw lists of the finalists and then the name of the winner. That would have been enthralling and inspiring, wouldn’t it?
andsome blog 
Mark Lennox Said:
on 12/10/2013 at 3:33 pm
Hi Mark, it’s an interesting take and may I say completely valid. This is why we have and will be taking the following measures.
1. The reason why the winners won was explained by our compere on the awards night. This information is also being uploaded to the official site in the next 24 hours.
2. Pre-awards we partnered with Qandidate.com who contacted every finalist about writing an article about being a finalist in the awards. From a learning point of view, this was hugely valuable to see what exactly these companies are doing to deserve finalist status. Here’s an example of a recent article with Admiral http://qandidate.com/blogpost/in-house-recruitment-strategies-10-admiral/
3. In addition to the above, Qandidate also interviewed all of the judges to provide further transparency about the judging process, you can view an example of this here: http://qandidate.com/blogpost/the-judges-interviews-3-rob-jones/
We have contacted many of the finalists with snippets of information to help them understand why they didn’t win this year and any other constructive advice gleaned from the judging process.
It’s fair to say we can always do more and we always strive to achieve better results than the previous year’s before.
Hope this helps, but do let me know if you have any further questions I can be reached on mark@inhouserecruitmentawards.co.uk or 07960 937 695.