After months of nominations, shortlisting, and judging, the winners of this year’s 10th annual National Online Recruitment Awards have been announced.  The new venue was Sway London, in Covent Garden, and on Thurday 4th November, there wasn’t anywhere else any self-respecting online recruiter would have wanted to be.

Everyone who is anyone was part of the over 300-strong audience, including those from 66 Finalists for the 13 awards.  The 13th award was a particular high point, as it recognised the recruitment website that had made the greatest contribution to online recruitment since the NORAs began. The Recruitment Website of the Decade award was shortlisted to 8 Finalists, who all had video presentations shown on the night, between the usual award categories.  The winner, who can now claim bragging rights until 2020, was Jobsite, who also walked away with the Best Generalist Job Board award too.  Felix Wetzel, Jobsite’s Group marketing Director, was on hand to accept the awards with colleagues, and gave a great speech, including a promise of even better to come from the Portsmouth shirt sponsors.

All night the noisy crowd were particularly vocal, especially when their own sites were announced.  As ever, it’s great to see the genuine enthusiasm from our worthy winners. Of course, not every one left with a trophy, and there were healthy debates on the results.  However, all Finalists were clear that it was a great achievement to have got to this stage, and left further determined to return next year.

Stephen O’Donnell

NORA 2010 Winners

Award Category	Sponsor
Recruitment Website of the Decade
Best Generalist Job Board
Best Specialist (Niche) Job Board
Best Regional Job Board
Best National Recruitment Agency Website
Best Small Recruitment Agency Website
Best Major Employer Website
Best Small Employer Website
Best Online Recruitment by a Consumer Publication
Best Online Recruitment by a Trade Publication
Best Employment Advice Website
Best Newcomer in Online Recruitment
Best Innovation in Online Recruitment

You would be amazed at how many people are involved in the National Online Recruitment Awards.  As the most commonly identified person, I am always at pains to point out that there is an army of people who all make their own essential contribution to the NORAs.

To begin with, the jobseekers, on whose behalf we launched the awards, and who this year made almost 28,000 nominations for the recruitment websites they liked best (and told us why).  We then have a Shortlist Judging Panel of 9 industry experts, who visit every nominated site, and asses them from a candidate’s perspective.  Only then do our separate Judging Panel again go through the process of visiting and scoring every one of our 74 Finalists, from the point of view of a job seeker.

Of course an annual event like this needs quite some organising, and we have Louise Triance of UKRecruiter and the team at 1Job.co.uk to thank for that.  Some awards events in other industries are run as profit making exercises in their own right, and usually involve entrance fees, black-tie dinners, and whopping prices to buy a table for your company.  In the case of the NORAs, we always want to make them as accessible as possible, and not the least exclusive.  That’s why, with the help of our sponsors, we are able to keep the ticket price down to a nominal £20, which mostly goes towards the venue and bar bill.

Throughout all of this, however, we try to never lose site of the most important thing; candidates themselves, and how the myriad of recruitment websites are continually evolving to help them find what they are truly searching for.

I hope to see you at the NORAs on Thursday, and wish all of our Finalists the very best of luck.  http://www.eventelephant.com/recnet4nov

Stephen O’Donnell, Chairman

We are extremely proud to announce the Finalists for this year’s tenth National Online Recruitment Awards.  Now covering a full decade, the NORAs have become established as the standard by which all recruitment websites are measured.  Uniquely, the awards are initially nominated by job seekers themselves, in order that the perspective of those who utilise each site remains paramount.  This year we received almost 28,000 nominations for 592 separate websites.  http://www.norauk.com/finalists-2010

Our selection panel of industry experts (see below) then carefully assessed each site, from a candidate’s point of view, to arrive at the shortlist of tremendous sites in all 13 categories.  Our categories recognise all manner of recruitment websites, including not only dedicated job boards, but also recruitment firms, publications, advice websites and employers themselves.  We will also present awards for Best Newcomer, and Best Innovation in Online Recruitment.

This year, to mark our 10th anniversary, we have a very special award.  The “Best Recruitment Website of the Decade” award will recognise those sites which have made the greatest contribution to online recruitment during the last ten years.

To ensure absolute integrity, our Finalist will now be judged by a separate panel of Judges, and the Winners will be revealed at our awards event, in London, on Thursday the 4th of November.

Shortlisting Panel

To bring us to this point, we have a Selection Panel of industry experts, who have assessed all websites nominated by jobseekers, and produce our shortlist of Finalists.  To ensure transparency in the awards process, this group are quite separate from our Judging Panel, but just as vital to the NORAs.

Alan Whitford

Keith Robinson

Peter Gold

Alex Hens

Andy Headworth

Steve Evans

Ben Nunn

Lisa Scales

Today, Friday 10^th September, marks the last day of nominations for this year’s National Online Recruitment Awards.  Nominations closed at 5:00pm, and we received 776 on the last day alone.  As ever, the response from the public has been outstanding.

Additionally this year, we have introduced a new method of nominating your favourite recruitment websites, where we asked for extra feedback, giving the reasons for your nominations.  From this feedback, along with some basic demographic profiling, we hope to have a clearer picture of what candidates are looking for in a recruitment website.

We now begin the process of reducing the huge volume of nominations to the Finalists in each award category.  To do this, we have an outstanding panel of experts, who will assess all nominated sites from a candidate’s perspective.  For the first time, we will also be taking into account each sites offering to candidates on mobile platforms, such as smartphones etc, whether it be iPhone and Android Apps or a site tailored for use on a small screen.

This year we also have a very special award.  To commemorate our 10^th anniversary, we will present the Recruitment Website of the Decade Award to the site judged to have made the greatest contribution to the sector during the past ten years.  Finalists for this award will be selected from the 201 websites who have been NORA Finalists and Winners in this period, as well as those shortlisted this year.

As scheduled, we will be announcing the Finalists for the tenth annual NORAs on Tuesday 28^th September at 12 noon.  All sites shortlisted will be entitled to use this logo immediately.

The Winners of the NORAs 2010 will be revealed at our awards event, in London, on Thursday 4^th November.  You can reserve your ticket here.  https://www.eventelephant.com/recnet4nov

We are now in the last month of nominations for the NORAs.  Any site wishing to participate and promote their excellence to candidates can still get their nomination material before it’s too late.

Individuals wishing to make nominations can visit the nomination form and share their thoughts on who should be considered for an award and why.

All nominated sites will then be put to our Short-listing panel to decide the finalists for each category. These sites will then be put to the Judging panel, who take time out of their busy schedule to examine and determine which sites perform best, from a candidates perspective.

We will then look forward to the main event this year at SWAY, in central London, hosted by 1Job.co.uk & AllJobsUK.com. Here, the awards will be presented to the winning sites by our award sponsors.

This year we are lucky enough to have secured HRMagazine.co.uk as our media partner, and they will be providing coverage of the event in their widely read publication.

As always, we expect the awards to be hotly contested – please ensure that your favourite sites are considered for an award.

We are delighted to announce that long standing friends of the NORAs are continuing their support by sponsoring our awards.  The Ladders, Actonomy, CV Library and BarrelFish (sister company of Perms Connect) have renewed their association with the awards for our tenth anniversary year.

As you know, we deliberately design our event to be as welcoming and accessible as possible to all, by making it a less formal affair.  We don’t generate revenue by table sales, and there are no entry fees for the NORAs.  This makes the support we have from our sponsors all the more important, and enables us to run the event professionally and ethically, culminating in a night of celebration worthy of our Finalists and Winners.

NORA 2010 Sponsors

In a move that reflects the ever evolving recruitment marketplace, HR Magazine is to be the Media Partner to the National Online Recruitment Awards, for their 10^th Anniversary year.  Siân Harrington, Editor, will also take a seat on the Judging Panel for 2010.

HR Magazine are firmly established as the definitive journal of record for the UK’s Human Resources sector, and as such have a breadth of readership which includes all major HR decision makers in Britain.  The award winning HR Publication of the Year, reaches even further still with its outstanding website; providing authoritative editorial news and insight on a continual basis.

Editor of HR Magazine, Siân Harrington said “We have seen the growing sophistication of our profession in its engagement in candidate attraction via online recruitment.  We are extremely pleased to be involved with the National Online Recruitment Awards, in their 10^th anniversary year.”

Founder of the NORAs, and Chairman of the Judging Panel, Stephen O’Donnell remarked, “We are particularly excited to have HR Magazine on board as Media Partner.  The early days of online recruitment were dominated by job boards and recruitment agencies, but the last couple of years have seen an accelerating take-up by increasing numbers of small and large employers alike.  The rise of social media in the past 18 months has added an extra dimension to strategies being utilised by progressive employers and especially their HR departments.”

Nominations for the NORAs are made directly by job seekers, and are open until 10^th September.  The awards ceremony itself will be held on 4^th November in Central London.

Guest blog, from Keith Robinson.

Many thanks to Stephen for letting me write this article and doing such a great job with NORAuk.  I am a huge fan of recognizing and rewarding excellence in any sector. Having been shortlisted last year with my new launch Careersiteadvisor, I know the thrill and anticipation when you are at the event… you cannot beat it and Stephen “Thanks for setting these, up and continuing to run the NORAUK”.   Stephen asked me to write something on/about On-Line Recruitment so a short ramble;

I saw my first job board in the U.S in 1996 on a visit to my advertising agency partner in Chicago, Shaker. I was blown away with what I saw and the opportunities I foresaw with such a platform – “the internet”, and with the quick and easy ability to search a large volume of jobs from across wide geographical regions.

Only 15 years ago recruitment media was “print”; strong national, regional and trade newspapers dominated, and often had no or little competition. In reality they had local monopolies and charged accordingly.

To place a recruitment advertisement in two local newspapers Nott’s Evening Post and the Derby Evening Telegraph could cost £60 for a single column centimeter (hugely expensive), and yet your potential candidate lived in that broad geographical area.

The “job board” had the ability to go across newspaper boundaries, and to me the opportunities to “break monopolies”, deliver new and exciting channels to “passive” candidates were limitless.

My next enlightenment came a year latter when again in the U.S I saw a company careers site, wow awesome, and given at this time I worked for a Recruitment Advertising Agency again for me what opportunities, branding, jobs, interactivity, etc etc….. but as usual I got carried away with the “limitless technology capabilities” and forgot that less that 15% of UK home had internet, and those that did were on dial-up and a heavy page took hours to download.

BUT interest had been stimulated and now it was a matter of time…. Waiting for the consumer to catch up with the technology, and the infrastructure build out to lead the consumer.

By 1998/1999 we had our first print causality, Freelance Informer, a Reed Business owned trade magazine for IT Contractors which folded due to the migration of that audience to Robbie Cowling’s Jobserve.

In 2000 I joined Totaljobs.Com and my love of on-line recruitment just grew, understanding what “job seekers’ wanted (Real Jobs with Real Companies), how a poor “candidate experience” impacted on a company’s P&L. So much so, that in 2001 we decided to take the advice of an awesome strategist at Totaljobs, Andrew Findlater and share our findings.

We created the Totaljobs Seminar Program and over 3 years ran 70 plus roadshows across the UK and helped “educate” over 700 industry professional on the benefits of On-Line Recruitment, many of today’s “In-House Recruiters” attended and we shared our passion for a move towards more in-house recruiting.

Alan Whitford our regular Chairman shared is passion for the “time and cost” to hire matrices, and we even talked about “cybersleuthing” i.e. on-line sourcing. Yes, in 2001 we had Roy Everett (spiderman) talking on the subject.. we saw a bright future for recruitment, and it was on-line.

Today we are there, but it has been much slower than I ever expected. On-line has, or is just about to overtake print media, and a recession or two doesn’t help.

We now have social media, on-line referrals, ATS… a whole multi – billion pound/dollar industry has been built to support “On-Line” recruitment.

But finally I have some regrets, and I will share them.

- We have commoditized a key part of our industry – the job advertisement, and boy what a poor candidate experience most job postings give.

- We have seen great creativity, great copy writing, and great typography disappear.

- We have made it more difficult for a job seeker to find a job – search does not work, the future has to be matching.

- We have made it too easy for job seekers to apply for a job, and for a recruiter to delete a CV. My term is “the promiscuous digit”.

BUT job boards are not dead, more will launch and other versions of boards will evolve.

The future is bright, the future is On-line Recruitment… whatever that might look like.