This week I’ve been thinking about submissions. No, not arm bars, rear-naked chokes, or paying a leather-clad escort to urinate on me (although that has crossed my mind). I mean the increasingly common necessity for us recruiters to write stuff telling people how great we are at something in order to be rewarded with…something. The obvious example was the subject of last week’s blog: the SEEKs SARA awards. For those who have never entered, the process works as follows. The categories are announced and the awards are deemed open for submission. You, or your boss, or your staff think that you, your staff, or your boss are worthy of an award, and then proceed to ask ChatGPT to answer a set of questions explaining why you are the best. This is your submission. In the case of the SARAs, these submissions are anonymised, and divvied out to the judges to score. The winner gets a bit of Perspex and a new email signature. Now the above description may sound somewhat negative – however, that’s not my intention. The method SEEK now use to select winners is infinitely better that what they were doing back in 2011 when I arrived in New Zealand. Back then, SARAs were awarded on a “number of votes” basis. Essentially, a recruitment firm would enter, receive a link which could be emailed out to clients, candidates, relatives, Bangladeshi sweat shops, and Grindr subscribers, and whoever got the most clicks, won. This exercise would turn normally sane Recruitment Consultants into the worst kind of doTerra/Herbalife/Isagenix Facebook-jockeys, badgering old school friends for a “3 seconds of their time to support a local business”. To understand how far this parasitic assessment model stretched, I received a request for a SARA vote before I even decided to move to New Zealand. SEEK, thankfully moved on to something that, although far from perfect, added some commercial rigour to the process.
If we’re not “writing” a submission for the SARAs or RCSA awards, we’re tendering to get on a panel. The last AoG tender is more than well documented here, but suffice to say, it is a lesson on the pitfalls of writing tenders and submissions. If we look at who got on (and who didn’t) it is clear that writing a tender document which is then assessed by “experts” is a flawed model. In the case of AoG, the problems are numerous, however the crux of the issue lies in the fact that it is human nature to judge the submission, and not the actual business. In the case of AoG, there were firms with a long history of providing great service to government agencies who somehow missed the mark on the RFP. Other firms (who had placed as little as four people into government EVER), somehow crafted a submission that was so “on the money” that they not only got on, but managed to sell their place to a more deserving business at a sky-high price. The difference? Perhaps a better PR company (who actually wrote the thing). Likewise, who remembers the “Great Māori Recruitment Resurgence” of 2022? Yeah, you remember! All of a sudden, recruitment firms who used to cross the road at the sight of a moko were now starting the day with a waiata and hiring “special advisors” with names like Tāne, Wiremu, and Kahurangi. Funnily enough, as soon as the panel was announced, the recruitment GMs went back to voting for David Seymour. It’s as if this commitment to Māoridom was insincere and dare I say…performative.
The problem in addressing this flawed system is that there is no easy answer. In the case of awards, in my experience, most seem content with the self-congratulatory nature of it all. Robert Walters run “The New Zealand Leadership Awards”, which is a cynical attempt to cosy up to decision makers before we even factor in the type of leader that Stuart Nash is (or was). Consult’s Angela Cameron sits as a judge on the “Best Places to Work Awards” and blogs about “leading with authenticity and impact” – a tome that sits somewhere between Ed Gein’s “The Female Orgasm: A Gentleman’s Guide” and Heinrich Himmler’s “The Jewish Question: Can’t we all just get along?”. Does anyone care? Nah, not really. As long as we all have a good time right?
And so, we arrive at the inevitable conclusion: there is no perfectly fair or foolproof system for tenders, panels, or awards. Judging a 47-page RFP is often more about optics than outcomes. However, if we’re going to keep up this theatre, could we at least start giving a little more weight to the opinions of those who actually use the service? You know, hiring managers. Internal recruitment teams. Anyone who repeatedly uses us. These are the people who know which recruiters are actually doing the job, and not just writing LinkedIn thinkpieces about “talent ecosystems”. Ask them who they want on a recruitment panel. Ask them which firms deliver, and which ones disappear faster than that non-exec Māori fella. It won’t make the process perfect, but it might make it slightly less ridiculous. And if that fails, fine. Just do what Randstad did and give the award for “best place to work” to Air New Zealand every year. At least then we can all stop pretending.
Have a good weekend.
^SW
