There are many business benefits associated with winning industry awards, probably the most underrated is the positive impact that it can have on your recruitment team.
Whereas there used to be only one or two annual award events to consider, in Australia, New Zealand and the UK there are now a number of credible organisations each running their own awards. These include:
- RCSA
- Seek
- APSCo
- REC
- TALiNT Partners
- Global Recruiter
- Plus there are a number of broader business awards such as HRINZ, Westpac, Deloitte, Optus etc.
So, if finding an award to enter is no longer a problem, how do you ensure all the effort required to put the award entry together actually pays off?
We’ve been helping our clients to plan and write awards for several years now and have been pretty successful, winning at least one award from each of the above organisations. Using what we’ve learnt from our successes (and failures!), we’ve built up an internal formula of what it takes to conceptualise a credible entry and then write a winning submission. Here are our top tips for winning a recruitment award.
1. Pick Your Award Carefully
There are some award categories that are obvious choices, but they aren’t always the best option. Things to consider are the likely levels of competition and whether your business has truly done something unique or significant in the category you’re considering entering. The feedback from judges is that they got a lot of entries that may have been considered winners several years ago, but the bar is now much higher, with many agencies really pushing the limits of innovation and commitment to their industry, staff or customers. So, in addition to picking the award carefully, also do great work!
2. Plan in Advance
Following on from point one, the best results go to those that plan their entry the year before. This doesn’t play well to a recruiter’s natural instincts, as most of us like instant gratification, however we always experience better results when the particular points or topics have been pre-planned. Doing this has the added bonus of providing additional guidance and direction for your overall business strategy.
3. Aim for Low Hanging Fruit
Some awards are simply just not as popular or easy to win. Whilst winning Large Agency of the Year may be the best accolade, picking up best Back Office Support Team is just as satisfying and potentially easier to win.
4. Use Every Opportunity to Present Evidence
This is the biggest opportunity to stake a claim for winning the award. A lot of drafts we read contain generalisations and talk to points that hold very little relevance to the actual award itself. We try to corroborate every statement, backing up each point with clear evidence. It could be a testimonial about a particular change from the team or a client, financial results or any other relevant metric. In addition, we always ensure that we have a validated response for each point highlighted in the award definition. This way the judges can easily tick off their criteria without having to hunt for examples. For example, if the definition asks for examples of the team working together, we’ll explain a situation where this happened and include a testimonial from someone in the team about this scenario.
5. Follow the Instructions
We’re embarrassed to put this in, but having seen so many other articles talking about this point we thought it best to cover it off. So, stick to the word limit, present your information in the exact format requested, proof your work (and have someone else do it), take advantage of links and attachments if you’re permitted to do so, use a legible font and font size and ensure you have enough time to submit the entry itself!
If this all sounds like an awful lot of work, that’s because it is! The good news is that our expert team of marketers and copywriters are more than happy to help, please feel free to get in touch to discuss how we can help to get your brand into the limelight.
Good luck!
