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.

To commemorate our tenth year, the National Online Recruitment Awards announces a unique special award for the “Recruitment Website of the Decade”. Each year, since its inception, the National Online Recruitment Awards seeks to identify the very best examples of excellence in the recruitment sector.  We do this by asking candidates themselves to nominate their favourite websites in each of the award categories, and to say why.  There are 12 award categories, recognising job boards, publications, recruitment agencies and employers.

The NORAs also recognises newcomers to the market and innovation in online recruitment.  All of these awards are initially nominated by the public, and shortlisted by the NORAs panel of experts, from a candidate’s perspective.  Only then will they have compiled the Finalists for each year’s NORAs. This year the NORAs are making an exception.  For the first time, and in celebration of the first 10 years of the NORAs, we will be presenting a very special award, with a twist.  The “Recruitment Website of the Decade” award will not be a nominated category, as all the contenders will be drawn from those sites who have already been nominated by candidates throughout the last ten years, and become Finalists and Winners for the NORAs.  As the name suggests, this award will recognise those websites that have made the greatest contribution to online recruitment during the last ten years.

This year is the 10^th anniversary of the awards.  We originally devised the NORAs in 2000, and held the first awards in 2001.  Whilst ten years is a remarkable achievement in this sector, online recruitment has been a leading force in the development of the Internet since 1993, when Robbie Cowling founded JobServe.  Since the year 2000, the NORAs has charted the birth and growth of many companies and websites which have become household names in the UK, including S1Jobs, Monster, Jobsite, CV-Library, Totaljobs, Reed, Telegraph Jobs, The Grocer and many, many more.

Stephen O’Donnell, Chairman of the NORAs said, “The NORAs are not your typical industry awards.  From the beginning they have been all about the candidates; the jobseekers.  We ask for public nominations because we are primarily focussed upon the benefits of online recruitment for each and every individual searching for jobs online.  Last month we launched the nominations process for the tenth time.  In the previous nine years of the NORAs, there have been 587 Finalists (over 220 unique), and 86 awards have been presented to 56 separate websites.”

He continued, “This year, we will also be considering each website’s presence on the mobile web, whether via a mobile website or iPhone/ Android application.” The accolade “Recruitment Website of the Decade” can be achieved by only one website every ten years.  This flagship award is sure to be much coveted, by those who aspire to such heights.

The Finalists for this, and all awards, will be announced on Tuesday 28^th September, and the awards event itself will be on Thursday the 4^th of November.

Every year, for the past ten years, I get swamped with enquiries from recruitment agencies, job boards and employers, asking how to enter a website into the National Online Recruitment Awards.  “Where do I register, how do I apply, how much does it cost?” etc.  Well, let me answer all those questions, and show you how we’ve made it even simpler.

The essential foundation of the NORAs is built upon nominations, and not votes.  We ask candidates to nominate the recruitment websites they like best, in each of our 12 award categories.  This means that webmasters don’t have to register or apply, as all nominations have been made directly through our awards website, www.NORAuk.com. Each year, in addition, we have produced graphics for websites to display, in order to encourage their own visitors to nominate their site, and give reasons why.  This has always proven to be very popular, but of course some sites don’t want to divert busy candidates from their job searching activities.

In response to this, we have now developed a unique “One-Click” nomination process. By registering on our site (http://www.norauk.com/nomination-material), you can then select a suitable “Nominate this site” graphic, and then copy the unique HTML code to insert on your website.  This then displays the chosen graphic where inserted, and enables a candidate to nominate the site with a single click.  Additionally, candidates are also given the opportunity to give direct, but anonymous, feedback, before continuing their pursuit of that ideal job.

In 2009 we received almost 25,000 nominations, for 657 separate recruitment websites.  The greater the engagement we can encourage from individual job seekers, the greater depth of feedback we have to work with in selecting the Finalists for the awards.  By considering in detail this candidate response, and assessing job sites from a candidate’s perspective, our panel of industry experts can arrive at a rich shortlist of sites that represents the very best internet recruitment services in the UK.

In less than 2 weeks, we have already had 50 websites register for “1-Click NORA Nomination”. More sites, more nominations, and greater candidate involvement will further reinforce the credibility of the National Online Recruitment Awards as it enters its second decade.

Nominations will remain open until Friday 10^th September, and the Winners will be revealed at the NORA’s 10^th Anniversary Event, on the 4^th November.

Stephen O’Donnell, Chair of the NORAs

Today we launch the nominations process for the 10^th annual National Online Recruitment Awards.  This historic anniversary for the definitive online recruitment industry awards confirms not only the longevity of the candidate-nominated awards, but also the prestige and acclaim accorded to the achievement of our Finalists and Winners.  Having a full decade under our belt, in such a young industry, means that we have a history that accurately maps the development of the sector, and how the industry has utilised internet technology to meet the individual needs of job seekers.

Nominations from candidates will remain open until 10^th September.  At that point, our selection panel of industry experts will assess all nominees, and produce a shortlist of Finalists for each of the 12 award categories.  It should be pointed out, that all sites are assessed from a candidate’s perspective, and that no site pays a charge to be considered for the awards.

Finalists will be announced on 28^th September, and our awards ceremony will be held in Central London on the 4^th November.

Stephen O’Donnell, Chairman of the NORAs

This may seem a no-brainer to anyone in the online recruitment industry, and perhaps even a preposterous question for me to ask, given my role in the sector over the past decade.

Commerce aside, it is perfectly possible to provide a service, where every single available vacancy is locatable via one solitary website.  How simple and convenient would that be for candidates?  If such a site existed, there would be no real need to trawl a multitude of job boards, searching, registering, applying again and again.  Surely then jobseekers would only have to register once in a great big CV Database.  Here too, employers could easily identify them, sure in the knowledge that these are the best available candidates to consider for each role?  “Crazy talk” you say? “It’ll never happen”.  That may be so, but it’s precisely what the major players in our industry are aiming for, and each has every intention of eventually becoming that universal job board.  In a market that’s so fragmented, every website has ambitions.  Firstly to succeed as a business, and then to grow by gaining market share and popularity, and of course revenue.  Totaljobs announced today that it has 12.7% of the UK online recruitment sector.  Does it want more?  Do Monster and Jobsite have other plans?  You can bet they do. Even down to the smallest of niche employment sectors, there are sites battling for market share; be it revenue, number of vacancies, clients, visitor numbers, or a host of other KPI’s.  These are businesses after all, and their commercial success is not always in the best interest of candidates.

Employment agencies succeeded hugely in the 80’s and 90’s because they could identify and recruit more efficiently and cost effectively than employers could themselves.  This, in addition to the traditional advert, then created another layer between the candidate and the job.  In the early days of online recruitment there were great fears that job boards would spell the end for agencies, and it was expected that employers would be the biggest advertisers by far.  Several job boards even refused to run any ads from agencies at all.  But that wasn’t to be.  This was a young and extremely competitive market, and agencies represented the greatest repositories of the very jobs that jobsites needed to satisfy candidates.  Moreover they represented the very best opportunity for consistent revenue, even if they paid much less per job ad than employers.  Thus, the great opportunity for disintermediation was lost.  Not on purpose, of course, but there are now thousands of job boards, niche job boards, publications with job boards, agencies’ own job boards, and employers’ job boards.  Is this easier for candidates?  Has the solution become the problem?

Now in a fully mature market, talk frequently focuses rightly upon the “candidate experience”.  It’s fair to expect fierce competition to continue between the big players, and for a new accountancy job board to launch every month, but let’s not kid ourselves that a mirror broken into a thousand pieces can possibly produce a complete picture.  No one player will become universal, but it is still possible that somehow the pieces can be seamlessly integrated, so that, at least from the jobseeker’s perspective, they can view a complete and comprehensive picture of what jobs are available to them.  Job Search Engine’s, or aggregators, like 1Job.co.uk and Workcircle are the closest to this we have so far.  That is also technology’s next challenge in this market.

In fact I understand that at this very moment, the Department for Work and Pensions have plans to do precisely this, via the revamped Job Centre Plus website.  However, whilst worth paying close attention to, you’ll forgive me for not holding my breath.

Stephen O’Donnell

Throw open the shutters, open the windows, and take the sandbags from the doors. The storm of recession has past, and we can all get back to normal. Perhaps not quite.According to the Office of National Statistics, the UK economy experienced growth of 0.1% in the last quarter, and unemployment unexpectedly fell by 7,000 in December. Now that the snow has cleared away, there’s nothing to stop us. These figures may be great for confidence, but there is much to overcome still in the recruitment market. Unemployment may have dropped slightly, but so too has the employment rate (down to 72.4% from a peak of 75% in early 2008). A study, produced in January by the CIPD, reveals that 1.31 million people were made redundant during the recession, and that two-thirds of those, who subsequently found work were paid an average of 28% less in their new job.

There are no prizes for guessing how this will affect the confidence of jobseekers, employers and the professional recruitment sector.This has been reflected in the volume of vacancies advertised online.The AlljobsUK.com Online Recruitment Index has monitored the number of job adverts on the UK’s major job boards for the last 10 years.If we take January 2008 to be the beginning of the employment crisis, then our Index was standing at 1,703.31. 2 years later, it’s 59% lower, at 821.51. In that time, the much predicted demise of print advertising as a primary advertising channel came to pass as. Whilst trade magazines and some newspapers still carry job adverts, it’s only with an accompanying job board.

In bald terms, the Alljobs Online Recruitment Index shows that the number of job adverts across the ten monitored sites has plummeted from 805,695 to a low of 258,992.Currently recovering slightly to 368,722, the details of each site are very illuminating. Firstly, we should know that many sites count their volume of vacancies differently, as they hold a job advert online for anything from a week to over a month. We collect weekly figures on how many vacancy adverts there are on each site at that time. The two charts, shown here, separate out Reed.co.uk and Totaljobs.com, as their volumes far exceed those of the other websites. Reed.co.uk is often taken to be an accurate indicator of job availability, as it is largely unimpeded by cost considerations. Free advertising means that, within limits, all agencies can advertise every single vacancy they have. Despite their huge volumes, Reed is currently displaying only 31% of its maximum number of job adverts over the last 2 years. Similarly, and at the other end of the scale, JustEngineers.net have lost over 90% of their volume during the same period. Engineering and manufacturing sectors have clearly taken a big hit. Furthermore, whilst Monster have mostly outperformed their immediate rivals, Jobsite, Totaljobs and CVLibrary, they are now dipping and have lost 65% of their peak volume. Not only are there fewer vacancies, but a lesser proportion are being advertised in bulk on the biggest job boards.

As recruiters have been forced to re-evaluate all expenditure, online advertising with the major job boards has suffered enormously. The old model of “advertise and wait” simply doesn’t work on its own anymore, and recruiters are having to be far more active and creative, in order to identify and attract candidates. Social media websites, in the form of Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter are being exploited, and all networks are being leveraged by recruiters determined to satisfy clients.

We have now seen an encouraging bounce-back from the extended winter dip. The Alljobs Index is up 244.48 since New Year, and many other market indicators are positive. If the statistics are anything to go by, where we have now had steady figures for the past 12 months, the threat of a “double-dip” appears to be increasingly unlikely.

Stephen O’Donnell