The Value of Winning Functional Excellence Awards

最好的战略招聘和人才管理领导者正在不断寻找方法来提高自己的成绩，他们的信誉，和他们的业务影响。为实现这些目标和发展的良好功能的最有力的工具之一是申请，并赢得了功能性奖励。

The very best strategic recruiting and talent management leaders are continually looking for ways to improve their results, their credibility, and their business impacts. One of the most powerful tools for reaching those goals and for developing an excellent function is to apply for and win functional awards. Some mistakenly think that applying for awards is strictly for ego gratification, but that would be a major mistake because the application process itself helps to drive functional excellence. This is because the award process focuses the entire team, and the award criteria themselves serve as excellent guidelines as to what does or does not impress business leaders. The award process forces you to understand metrics and to compare your practices and results to the very best. Applying and winning awards can build team cohesion and eventually it can lead to significantly higher internal credibility and larger budgets. If you ve been suffering through years of down budgets, the awards competition can give your team a spurt of energy and it can force them to pay more attention to the external talent competition, because recruiting and talent management are already daily external competitions. Awards to Consider If you excel in the area of recruiting, retention or talent management, I recommend that you first consider applying for the prestigious ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards (note: they have a January

11 deadline). Other awards in recruiting to consider include Recruitingawards.com and the Rasbic.com awards. As a long-term senior judge of these ERE awards, I can assure you that they display the very best practices from around the world. If you are anticipating a surge in recruiting or retention, now might be an opportune time to use the award process as a stimulant for beginning your turnaround. After you win one of these functional awards, you should next consider applying for a local, regional, or national best place to work employer brand award. The most prestigious one is sponsored by Fortune Magazine and winning it can dramatically impact your recruiting results. Workforce magazine also sponsors a prestigious set of HR awards known as the Optimas awards cover each of the functional areas within HR. Potential Benefits From Winning Functional Awards Applicants, finalists, and winners all receive many benefits from the awards process. I have broken the benefits into two categories: company benefits and functional team benefits. A) Company benefits Even though the award may be won by a single function, the impacts can be much broader. Improved employer brand-building and recruiting the visibility that comes from winning or even being listed as a finalist will dramatically help your retention and recruiting efforts. If you conduct surveys during onboarding, you will frequently find that external awards, recognition, and media coverage are major factors that influence a candidate s job search and acceptance decision. Increased media and Internet exposure not only will the awards themselves result in more exposure, but the follow-up local and national media coverage can also be powerful. The awards will also be talked about on social media, in tweets and blogs, and they will also appear on Google searches. An assessment and improvement tool you can t win awards without first completing a broad assessment of your program in order to identify your areas of strength and weakness. The resulting assessment and follow-up changes will not only increase your chance of winning the award but they also will likely result in continuous program improvement and significantly better program results. Awards force you to use metrics and to identify your impacts although some awards are a public popularity contest, most of the elite ones are metric driven. In order to even qualify, you must include metrics and place a dollar estimate on your business impacts. If you use innovations like predictive metrics, you will further improve your chances. Awards force you to innovate because award criteria focus on innovation, the process forces you not to settle on continuous improvement but instead, to strive to be first with innovations. Improved benchmarking by winning awards you improve your visibility and value as a best practice benchmarking partner. As a result of your participation, more firms will be willing to trade best practices with you. Role model for HR when a single function like recruiting or employer branding wins an award, they serve as a positive role model for other HR functions to improve to the point where they can also win awards. B) Team and individual benefits Some of the benefits that can accrue to your functional team include: Increased team cohesiveness and pride putting together the award application by itself builds team cohesiveness and winning certainly dramatically tightens those bonds and increases team pride. Increased internal credibility winning an award or even showing that you rank among the very best will definitely build your team s internal credibility as well as your personal brand. Increasing your planning preparing to win an award requires a plan, and that plan can be a driver to increase other formal planning efforts that will allow you to better identify upcoming problems, competitor actions, as well as upcoming needs and opportunities. Improved recruiting for your team in addition to helping company-wide recruiting, the recognition from the award, coupled with the follow-up writing and speaking opportunities, will drive top talent in your functional area to consider joining your team. Decreasing the impact of any team negatives winning external awards provides you with authentic credibility. This credibility may help your team to successfully counterbalance any negative publicity that your team has had as a result of losing key staff, layoffs, and budget cuts. The award process can improve learning simply reading the award summaries or even volunteering to serve as a judge are both excellent ways to learn and to identify potential learning partners. Interactions with other applicants and judges at the award ceremony can also lead to long-term learning relationships. Career benefits winning awards can help your personal brand and may lead to salary increases, promotions, and external speaking opportunities. If you strive to help your profession, winning awards can help you become a best practice and thought leader. Budget impacts last but certainly not least, the external validation that comes from awards will likely help to support any requests for budget increases. Tips for Winning Awards As a longtime judge, I have reviewed thousands of these applications. From that experience, here are some tips to help you improve your chances of putting together a great application and winning. Develop an award criteria checklist the award review process is often quite structured. As a result, follow the criteria exactly and to avoid violating any rule that could disqualify you. I recommend that you put together a checklist to guide your work and to ensure that your application covers and exceeds each of the important assessment criteria. Pretest your award application you need fresh eyes to periodically review your application at several stages in order to ensure that you re covering the right elements and effectively selling your accomplishments. Work with marketing and communications not everyone in talent management excels at writing and selling. Work closely with your firm s marketing and communications professionals. Ask them to review and read your