An awards show in the U.K. is stirring up a lot of backlash from job board owners and other members of the recruiting space who feel they’ve been cheated by the event’s director.
The National Online Recruitment Awards, or NORA, which has been recognizing the web sites of job boards, employers, and recruiting agencies since 2001, is behind the controversy. AllJobsUk.com is the sponsor of the awards, and according to the web site, job seekers and other site users are supposed to determine who wins.
Not so, says a Cheezhead reader, who sent us this:
To sum up, the director behind the awards at alljobsuk is also involved at 1job and, in a nutshell, it is him, Stephen O’Donnell, that decides who the finalists are to go before the panel. In other words he can decide who is selected and who isn’t all under the guise of it being impartial when in effect clients and potential clients are favoured over anyone else. Job boards are starting to kick off about it. Also, and I have this from two job boards that if they advertise with alljobsuk it can help the job boards cause towards being a finalist!
On various discussion boards in the UK, it’s clear that those who were left out are indignant. Here’s a quote from one of the threads:
With apparently over 800 active jobsites in the UK and over 40k in votes O’Donnell is the decision maker on who gets to the finalist stage before it goes before the panel. How biased can that be? these awards are supposed to have been voted for by the jobseekers/ site users. In conclusion .. if you run a jobsite and hope to have a snowballs chance in hell of making the cut of the shortlist, brown nose O’ donnell by sucking up at networking events and be a 1 job client / award sponsor or cash generator for such as cv library who pays 1job for each cv registration they refer.
And here is a response from Stephen O’Donnell, the man behind the awards.
Good afternoon gentlemen, or ladies.
Firstly, thank you for your incisive comments.
Clearly I disagree with most of what you have speculated. However let me say this.
1. This is the 8th year of The National Online Recruitment Awards. I devised them in 2001 to recognise the best sites in a booming online sector.
2. From the beginning I wanted the sites to be assessed from the perspective of candidates. i.e. disregarding the cost to advertise on them and other commercial concerns.
3. AlljobsUK.com and 1Job have been sister sites since June 2007, and there has been no discernable change in the makeup of Finalists from before that date.
4. There is no correlation between sites that are clients of AlljobsUK.com, 1Job and the Finalists in this, or any other year.
5. Many of the sites that you say have been missed, are previous Finalsts and Winners of the Awards.
6. The credibility of the awards is extremely important to the judging panel, as is their credibility to the awards. Great lengths are taken to ensure that they are satisfied with the independence of the NORAs, and that the process is completely transparent.
7. Lastly, the NORAs are not entirely flawless, so we will always welcome suggestions on how to maintain and improve the credibility of the Awards.Thank you.
Stephen O’Donnell
If that’s not at least a partial admission to guilt, I don’t know what is. Click here to read more comments on the controversy, including one that says O’Donnell has lost all credibility within this market.
October 4th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
This is categorically not an admission of guilt! Quite the reverse. The quote that you show has been written in plain English, and states clearly that no website is favoured for reasons other than how well it matches the NORAs stated criteria.
There is not now, nor has there ever been even a whiff of corruption regarding the UK National Online Recruitment Awards.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:41 am
I’m not so sure it’s corrupt either. By I think you have to question the integrity of these “awards”, both in regards to the long “shortlisting” that’s a regular feature (a real ticket seller and friend maker that one), and the decisions arrived at. I approach it from the Employer Website element and have to say - yet again - these NORA awards continue to underwhelm and antagonize me.
After the 2007 results I was at a loss (and commented as much on http://www.DigitalRecruiting.co.uk) how anyone worth their judging salt could arrive at the decision that a decent effort, but still a fundamentally flawed site, for West Midlands Police could win Best Employer Website over the hugely impressive Royal Navy site. We all know that the budgets involved are so far apart as to warrant a different category for the Armed Forces sites it’s true - but when you hold one up against the other then there’s simply no competition (especially when you consider a PlodCast section (cleverest thing about the site was this quirky naming IMHO) with not a single podcast available within it to download!).
Then we’re onto this year’s shortlist and I find all of them dull dull dull. Perhaps NORA judges are looking for something different to myself - but I have this, perhaps quirky, feeling that awards should be awarded for “best in class”, not just “quite good”. We’re living in a world where rich media and true creative engagement is not just possible but all around us - so flat careers sections with an animated button or two just shouldn’t be held up as anything other than “awright” or a “decent effort”.
Now I don’t profess to have my finger on the industry pulse for best work coming out, but I do know there’s far far better out there. Perhaps the problem is how NORA draw up their shortlist, maybe they’re not seeing the full picture either - but however you cut it for any of these to win “Best Employer Website 2008″ will do the Recruitment Communications industry a massive disservice in regards to the strides we have made with creative digital execution.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Face it Stephen the whole awards are a sham you set up for personal benefit. Your site is pretty Sh8t anyway (it looks like you’ve spent about 4 minutes designing it) and most of the pages for submitting sites don’t even work - how anyone could ever think the NORA to be legit, is anyone’s guess.
Also, frankly, all the nominations on NORA are sh8t. There are some really terribly companies, who don’t deserve nominations up there - companies who happen to be in some way connected to you and your businesses. Give up the game. Accept that you are a cheat and we can all move on!