Winners (and losers?) from the 2010 Seek New Zealand Recruitment Awards

Seek’s annual 2010 Recruitment Awards were held at the Hilton in Auckland last Friday night but you’d be hard pressed to know anything about it unless you were actually there.  I’ve been keeping an eye out for a press release all week but there has been nothing on Seek’s actual website or any newsworthy site such as the Herald or Stuff.

One site did decide to pick up the release and publish it out there, so The Whiteboard would like to follow suit and publically list and congratulate this year’s winners:

The winning agencies in each category are:

Adecco Recruitment

Large Generalist Recruiter

1st Call Recruitment

Medium Generalist Recruiter

Select Recruitment & HR

Small Generalist Recruiter

Geneva Health

Large Specialist Recruiter

Parker Bridge

Medium Specialist Recruiter

Synergy Consulting

Small Specialist Recruiter

Potentia

IT Recruiter

Now I do wish to offer my sincerest congratulations to these winners – and also to Madison and Focus who became Seek Legends for having won the award three times – but is this really the cream of the New Zealand recruitment industry?  I can identify some firms on there that I certainly feel are well up there, but there are others I have never even heard of.

Regular readers of The Whiteboard will have seen some views and opinion on the Seek Awards in my post on August  5^th “SARAS – a credible award or just a popularity contest?”  I’m wondering if Seek are starting to come around to the same way of thinking because they certainly haven’t been singing from the rooftops about these latest winners.  Either that or they are purposefully playing it “low-key” after last year when the 2009 Winners and Finalists were announced to the Press roughly 2 hours before the awards actually took place (bit of a faux pas that took a distinct amount of excitement and anticipation out of the evening’s events).

As I wasn’t a finalist this year I wasn’t invited to the awards but luckily I had a mole in there who was sending out Tweets as the winners were announced.  This was actually quite exciting and I got to know the winners straight away without having to suffer all the whooping and hollering.

But it was another Tweet that I saw that I was quite surprised at.  It suggested that Anne-Marie Duff (GM of Seek NZ – well she was then – but it was her last day as she’s going to TVNZ as a Marketing Manager) took a bit of a playful swipe at Momentum during her intro speech and had a cheeky dig about the Stephen Wilce dodgy CV saga.  Apparently the comment was greeted with a second’s pause before the room exploded in great mirth and all-round points scoring against Momentum, all in front of a red-faced Anne-Marie.  I thought that was potentially a bit of an uncool comment as they are no doubt a large client of Seek, so I put out a Tweet of my own (from @JonathanRiceNZ):

“Is it true Anne-Marie from #Seek had a dig at Momentum in her speech at the Seek Awards?  Error of judgement?”

Well talk about opening a can of worms.  I mean I was only asking the question – not making a statement – but I was firmly rapped on the knuckles by Seek so I agreed to send out another Tweet advising my followers that it was untrue and Anne-Marie did not, in fact, say anything or make any reference at all to Momentum.

I was also informed that it was unfair on Anne-Marie as she had left Seek and couldn’t defend herself.  Well I’ve been thinking about this all week and decided that of course she has a chance to defend herself from my question-that-wasn’t-an-allegation-it-was-just-a-question-as-I-wasn’t-actually-there.  She can defend herself here, on The Whiteboard, by making a comment on this very post.

Of course anyone else who was there and also didn’t hear these comments can say so on here as well – and then I will be more than forthcoming with my apologies for having cast any aspersions in Seek’s direction whatsoever!

I have also found out that, all going well, a formal press release will be coming out in the early part of next week about the whole Momentum / Defence Force / Stephen Wilce saga – and I for one will be glad to hear an official statement at last.