A NORA Judge's Perspective

Looking forward to being a judge for The National Online Recruitment Awards – Guest blog by Katharine Robinson

Earlier this year, I was honoured to be asked to join the judging panel for this year’s NORAs (National Online Recruitment Awards). The judging panelconsists of a selection of independent judges from across the recruitment industry, all experts in their respective fields but none having an affiliation with a particular online recruitment site – so it is a massive honour to join such an illustrious group.

The NORAs are now in their 11th year, and are set to be bigger than ever. Nominations opened a few weeks ago, and anyone can go along and nominate the recruitment related websites they think are currently doing the best to in help job seekers find a new role. Last year the NORAs received over 28,000 nominations, covering more than 500 individual recruitment sites.

The initial aim of the NORAs was to give those using the web to search for jobs confidence that they were using quality sites. This is just as important now as it was 11 years ago, as there are new players joining the online recruitment industry all the time, giving job seekers a sometimes confounding wealth of options for their job search.

Being a judge will be really interesting for me. It will oblige me to try out hundreds of recruiting sites, no doubt discovering some gems along the way. I will also be asked to put myself in the position of the job seeker, judging the nominated websites based on how easy they are to use, and ultimately how useful they seem. I already focus quite a bit on trying to put myself in the shoes of “ideal talent” in order to search for them online – how do they describe themselves, where do they go online? Being a judge for the NORAs will take this one step further and, I hope, ultimately make me better at my job.

By far the most exciting categories will be Best Innovation and Best Newcomer. With players like Monster’s new BeKnown Facebook app entering the market in the last couple of weeks, we are seeing big shifts in the online recruitment world.

If you are currently searching for a job or you have recently found one – what sites have you found most useful? Take a moment to nominate them for a NORA 

Everyone, recruiter and job seeker alike, is welcome at the Awards Event on Wednesday 2nd November too – so look out for more information on that!

Ed: Katharine Robinson (aka @TheSourceress on Twitter) uses the Internet to track down tough to find talent. In January this year she joined Capgemini Consulting as Sourcing Recruitment Manager in their in-house recruitment team. Katherine is a frequent public speaker on the social web, and how it augments the real, social and professional worlds.