2024 Award Categories

Best Place to Work

This category celebrates organisations that go above and beyond to create environments where employees thrive, excel, and feel truly valued. If your company is dedicated to fostering a culture of innovation, inclusivity, and employee well-being, then this is the perfect opportunity to showcase your efforts and achievements.

Candidate Assessment

Sourcing and assessing qualified candidates to ensure they are right for the role, and your business, can be a challenging, complex process. There are various considerations when looking at the best assessment methodology to use. This category invites entries from companies and In-house Recruitment Teams who have successfully set-up a new assessment process, leading to improved hiring results.

Candidate Experience

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This category recognises outstanding service and care for candidates, highlighting an exceptional in-house recruitment operation that provides a uniquely positive experience throughout the hiring process. The winning entry will clearly demonstrate outstanding levels of candidate experience backed up by evidence which includes stats, facts and figures.

Career Site

Successful entrants to this category will be able to clearly highlight to the judges how their career website reflects the company’s brand ethos, whilst providing an engaging and helpful user experience that engages the jobseeker and provides them with the necessary information and understanding of the role and company whilst also being visually appealing.

Diversity, Equality & Inclusion Strategy

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This category recognises organisations putting strategies and initiatives in place that champion diversity and equality and show true excellence in inclusive employment, specifically applied to recruitment and selection practices and processes.  The winning entry will provide evidence on enhancing equality, diversity and inclusion; thus embracing the excellence of all candidates and employees irrespective of race, faith, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability and culture.

Early Careers Initiative

Early Careers isn’t exclusively reserved for those who have taken the university route or your first job. We want to recognise the efforts, creativity and impact of teams who have made a difference to those people early on in their career. It can be apprenticeships, career change, graduate schemes, armed forces, career switches, school leavers or more.

Employer Brand

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Entrants to this category will demonstrate triumphs in creating or developing an employer brand which reaches new heights, elevating it to be perceived as a ‘great place to work’. A successful and impactful Employer Brand is an integral part of the candidate journey that acts as an enhancement in the attraction, engagement, and retention of talent.

Executive Search Strategy

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Performing executive search for senior hires requires a range of skills and initiatives often distinct from the ordinary process. Entrants to this category will demonstrate success in achieving targets around cost, timelines, number and quality of desired executive level hires, whilst displaying an innovative approach to the overall executive search strategy.

High-Growth Hiring Strategy

Companies going through hyper-growth will face successful and challenging phases, in equal measures. As employees are at the heart of this growth period, ensuring a successful recruitment strategy is in place will be critical to overall success. This category invites entries from companies that are significantly scaling their headcount and have demonstrated high numbers of hiring success in a challenging environment.

In-house Recruiter (Individual)

Within any team there is often a stand-out performer. The winner of this award will be the individual that has demonstrated an exceptional level of attainment: going beyond the call of duty; or consistently identifying the best talent for the business; or creating the most dynamic recruitment strategy; or some other stand-out performance. What has defined them in the past 12 months?

In-house Recruitment Leader (Individual)

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Every successful recruitment team needs strategic leadership. The winner of this award will be the individual that has shown a consistently high level of team management, leading from the front to develop an entirely productive and efficient in-house recruitment team. Leadership and management take many guises.

Newcomer (Team)

Starting an in-house recruitment function from scratch takes an enormous effort and this category invites entries from organisations that have recently created an in-house recruitment team and have demonstrated success in a vastly challenging environment.

Onboarding Strategy

Having a structured onboarding process for new recruits plays a vital role in the retention and engagement of your employees. An effective process allows new hires to acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and behaviours not only for their role, but in understanding the company and how they fit. Thus, allowing the recruit to become a successful, engaged member of your organisation.

Outsourced In-house Recruitment Team (RPO / Embedded Solution)

This award invites RPO and Embedded providers to enter their very best onsite client team(s). Entrants to this category will accentuate the proposed outsourcing model and be able to evidence how their service improves the recruiting process for organisations. The outsourced function should act as a strategic partner to a business through technology, methodologies, and reporting resulting in the improvement of such items as the candidate pool, costs and governmental compliance.

Please note this category must be submitted by the outsourced company and be based on the methodologies and business solutions onsite at a specific client.

Please note that entries must be signed off, in writing, by the on-site client.

Recruitment Innovation

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Recruitment Innovation is defined as ‘doing something different to gain a competitive advantage’. This category invites entries from those with demonstrable and effective innovation of either strategy, new internal processes, marketing, use of resources, department collaboration, or any other area of difference. We’re looking for industry firsts and evidence of meeting a challenge head-on with an innovative, never seen, solution.

Please note that this entry is for In-house Recruitment Teams only and not for suppliers or vendors.

Recruitment Marketing Campaign

Recruitment marketing includes all communications used by your organisation to attract talent to work within it, whilst simultaneously building your employer brand. Entrants to this award should demonstrate a successful campaign that was innovative, functional and, ultimately, productive.

Recruitment Team – Small (less than 1,000 employees)

Entries are open to in-house recruitment teams with less than one thousand employees who can showcase their collective achievements of recruitment goals, development and/or refinement of recruitment strategy, innovation, effective campaigns and working closely with stakeholders (corporate, line managers, candidates, etc) resulting in a positive impact on their organisation.

Recruitment Team – Medium (1,000 – 5,000 employees)

Entries are open to in-house recruitment teams between 1,000 to 5,000 employees who can showcase their collective achievements of recruitment goals, development and/or refinement of recruitment strategy, innovation, effective campaigns and working closely with stakeholders (corporate, line managers, candidates, etc) resulting in a positive impact on their organisation.

Recruitment Team – Large (more than 5,000 employees)

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Entries are open to in-house recruitment teams with more than five thousand employees who can showcase their collective achievements of recruitment goals, development and/or refinement of recruitment strategy, innovation, effective campaigns and working closely with stakeholders (corporate, line managers, candidates, etc) resulting in a positive impact on their organisation.

Tech Hiring

Entries are open to in-house recruitment teams from all sectors who can showcase their achievements when hiring specifically for technical roles. This entry should highlight the development and/or refinement of your recruitment strategy when sourcing, engaging, and communicating with technical candidates. You will outline any innovations, effective campaigns, work with stakeholders (senior management, line managers, candidates, corporate teams etc), and impact on the organisation.

Use of Technology

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The number of Recruitment Technologies in the market is vast and the challenges that they are said to solve are just as varied. This category invites entries from companies and In-house Recruitment Teams who have successfully researched, selected and implemented a new technology into an element/s of their recruitment process with demonstrable improved results as a result of the new technology in place. Entries could be as a standalone tech implementation, as part of wider digital transformation, or somewhere in between.

Video Campaign

The ever-increasing use of video as part of a modern world has lent itself to incorporating itself into the world of candidate attraction and engagement. Video has the opportunity to accentuate an employer brand, and the need for creativity and initiative increased. This category recognises these traits as employers look to stand out from the crowd through video.

The video campaign might be stand-alone or part of a wider social/digital strategy, but it must be a video in its own right, and not a collection.