Is It Time To Fix The Problems With Employer Brand Awards?

I was listening to Dawn French chatting with Mo Gilligan on his podcast, I think it's quite an old episode I stumbled across, and she talked about not being comfortable with TV awards. She explained it with Hoover salespeople. If one Hoover salesperson sells more Hoovers than the next Hoover salesperson, and everything else is roughly equal - the size of their market, the training they've had and so on - then one is obviously the better salesperson, and they deserves the award. Nobody needs a judging panel to work that out.

Our industry doesn't work like that. What she said really resonated with me, because it's how I feel about the awards in our little corner of the world.

Before I go any further, I should be upfront. I've entered employer brand awards - agency and client-side, and I've won them. I've also been a judge. And I know some of the people who organise these things - they're lovely people who I respect. So this isn't about the entrants, the winners or the judges. I've got nothing against any of them. It's a case of don't hate the players, hate the game.

I'm also not talking about every award or every awards body out there. Take this as a pattern I've noticed, not a rule that fits all of them. Although, if I'm honest, I fear it's a virus that's increasingly spreading throughout most of them.

I want to make it abundantly clear that I'm very much in favour of celebrating the work and the people who deliver it in our industry. It's the competitive bit that bothers me. That, and what I perceive as an increasing commercial greed that targets that age-old human disease that we lovingly refer to as 'ego.'

Who am I to judge?

Judging means looking at someone else's creativity and deciding whether it's better than another person's. But who am I to judge the creativity of someone else? A) I'm not a professional creative and, B), if I subjectively don't like something, does that make it wrong?

There are so many variables. Different budgets, different team sizes, different leaders, different sectors, different problems to solve. You often see companies with huge war chest budgets and massive teams winning, whilst smaller, lesser-resourced teams are doing bloody great work and not getting the recognition they deserve for it.

Some people will say, "Oh, but it's the same category." Yes, it might be the same ocean but it can be very different boats, and you're not necessarily working with the same tools. We can both order the same cupboard from IKEA. It arrives flat-packed. If I've got a drill with the right bits, I'll build it much faster than you with your crappy little Allen key that comes in the box. The cupboard might look exactly the same in the end, but the effort in the background? What are we judging? The cupboard? Then how do you split the difference? The cleverness to decide on the drill? Or the tenacity and scrappiness to persevere with the inferior tool cards Ikea dealt you?

Then there are the judges themselves - their experience, their backgrounds, their competence. Are they all seasoned enough to tell good from bad? I'm sure plenty of them are. I'm just not sure all of them are, every time.

Then try proving it

It's not just creativity being judged, either. In our industry there's strategy, creativity and results, and the results bit can be incredibly hard to measure.

If it's a direct response campaign, and you needed to hire 100 people and you did it more effectively and more efficiently than you've done before, that's relatively easy to prove - as long as you've got historical data and past performance to benchmark against. A lot of people don't have that. And what if another company hit their hiring targets too, that, although smaller than company A's, was still a huge achievement relevant to their situation?

Now try measuring the impact of brand in this space. Whether it's consumer or employer, brand is always seen as the "fluffier" side, the more subjective side, the harder-to-measure side. Are you talking engagement? Are you talking sentiment? What benchmarks are you comparing against? Usually companies don't have their own benchmarks, either because they don't have the data, or because they do have the data but it's so disconnected it's impossible to make any use of it.

And when you run a social campaign, what are you measuring success by? If it's vanity metrics, I wouldn't necessarily call that success. Look at it through the eyes of a CEO and they're more interested in business impact. Can you prove that?

In the awards I've sat in on as a judge, you get a slide that says ROI. I sit there expecting to see a financial number, and instead I see likes, comments and reach, as I try my best to control the red mist that descends. It's not the effort I struggle with. It's calling it ROI.

The day I threw my hands up in the air

On one occasion as a judge, we were debating some entries for ages, trying to decide whether they should make it through to the final shortlist. We went round and round for so long that I challenged the group. We were there to award exceptional, standout work. If we were deliberating this long, it obviously wasn't standout, because standout work usually hits you almost immediately.

Someone then took me to one side and whispered in my ear. The reason they needed more entries, they said, was so they could send out more invites and sell more seats at tables.

At that point I just threw my hands up and thought, "well, fuck this then."

When everyone's a winner

Many years ago, being able to say you were award-winning was a badge of honour. But it's like in business - when everything's "a priority", nothing is.

When everyone's an award winner, who actually stands out? I used to have "I'm an award winning...," in my LinkedIn profile but I took it off a while ago with a sigh of, "what's the point?"

Part of the problem is the sheer number of categories. One of the main employer brand awards now has separate categories for communicating your employer brand to a Gen Z audience, to a Gen Alpha audience and to a Gen X audience. What next? Gen Geriatric?

At that same awards this year, 126 entries were shortlisted, and all 126 went home with a gold, silver or bronze. That's 40 golds, 47 silvers and 39 bronzes across 31 categories. Three of those categories had just one shortlisted entry. To be fair to them, they don't hide it. Their judging page says entries that score high enough are shortlisted, invited to the ceremony and given a trophy.

Some awards have gold, silver and bronze, and if you don't get bronze, you're still in with a chance of being awarded Highly Commended. What? You mean Gold, Silver and Bronze aren't already covering this? Seriously?!

Maybe it's just me, but if I got Highly Commended because I couldn't win a bronze, I'd be gutted (and slightly embarrassed 😳). I wouldn't be celebrating that. No knock on anyone who's proud of theirs - I'm talking about how it would feel to me. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm just too old, too gumpry, and too hard on myself. It's like in football. "Champions League" my arse. Several years ago perhaps, but now it includes teams who are so far from being 'Champions' it's laughable (and I say this as a long suffering Tottenham Hotspurs FC fan 😭).

I can't prove what's going on behind the scenes, but I'm prepared to die on this hill. A lot of this looks like an obvious play to bring in revenue, using the very human need to be seen, heard and recognised as the hook.

Go to some of these ceremonies and the halls are so packed out with tables and chairs you can barely walk between them anymore. It never used to be like that. Again, maybe it's me and my ever-expanding waistline, but the last ceremony I went to, I had to breathe in a lot bloody harder to pass through the tightly packed chairs as I tried moving across the venue we were all tightly stuffed into.

Now, I've no problem with anyone making money from putting on a great night. Viva capitalism!, n'all that. There's a hotel to pay for, all the food and drink, and a celebrity compère. In my experience the judges aren't paid, and there's sponsorship coming in on top from job boards, SaaS providers and agencies. Make a bit of profit. At the very least, break even. But shortlisting people who have no real chance of winning, just to sell more tables, is wrong. Pure and simple.

No doubt the awards industry started out with good intent, and some people may well hide behind that now. But in my opinion, an increasingly less subtle element of financial greed has set in. There are probably some players on the award-giving side who know exactly what they're up to, and shame on them. At this rate they'll run out of categories. On second thoughts, who am I kidding?!

"But marketing has its awards"

People will say that, and it does. The most famous is Cannes Lions, where everyone heads to the south of France and there are more than 30 different awards to go for. It runs on the same model - you pay to enter. Entry fees for 2026 ran from €690 to €2,825 per entry, depending on the category and how close to the deadline you left it. In 2025 they had 26,900 entries, which one trade title estimated brought in over US$40 million in entry fees alone.

I also don't think you can necessarily compare consumer marketing and advertising with our world. Some adverts have gone on to make a real dent in culture. Vorsprung durch Technik. This is not just food, this is M&S food. Beanz Meanz... Adidas, Nike (before McKinsey came in and drained them of their creativity in favour of an obsession for bean counting!) Anything Guinness used to do. I could easily go on. There are multiple cases where they've entered society's lexicon and become cultural artefacts. As much as I love employer branding and talent marketing, I don't think we've ever quite had that kind of impact, or become part of pop culture.

"What about the Oscars?"

Others will compare us to film and music. The Oscars, the music awards. There are a few big differences.

Oscar voters can watch the film. Admittedly, some of them might not, but they have the option to see the whole product, the output and the impact it's had. Our judges see a write-up, usually with a very short word count limit applied to it. So often you're not judging the work, you're judging the quality of the entry. And some agencies are much better at putting an entry together than others.

Music has its objective elements too. Charts, sales, streams - all hard numbers. There's a Hoover salesperson sitting underneath it.

The end product is different as well. A film or a song is the product itself. An employer brand campaign is a means to an end - hiring people, keeping people, changing a culture - so it should be judged on that end. Which is very difficult to do, because so many things can contribute to those outcomes.

Then there's who's paying. There's no entry fee to submit a film for the Oscars - the Academy says so in its own submission FAQ. In its 2023 financial year, the Academy Awards and related activities brought in $143.5 million of the Academy's $225.6 million total revenue, with the TV rights sitting with ABC. To be fair, it's not completely clean. Contenders do pay the Academy to reach its voters, through things like its online screening room and email blasts to members. But getting in the running costs nothing.

The creds deck

I've worked agency-side, so I know it's lovely for agencies to have their work recognised. There's a business development angle too. You sit down in front of a client, open your creds deck, and there are all the awards you've won.

But I've also been client-side. I've sat through those presentations, and every agency has hundreds of awards. It's become habituated, to the point where people barely notice them anymore. If it's for new business, fair enough. If it's about ego, own it. But if you work with me, whoever you are, I'd rather we focus on having an impact on your business than boosting someone's self-image.

What I'd actually give an award for

If we're going to hand out awards, let's give them for the stuff that will resonate most with anyone who's been in this world for a good chunk of time.

An award for having a great idea, going through 117 rounds of opinions, and not throttling the life out of someone like that type of committee does to any shred of initial creativity.

An award for delivering when the brief changed straight after sign-off, with an enormous dose of scope creep.

An award for the creative agency that worked with a client who made their life hell, and they managed to deliver whilst smiling throughout.

An award for the client who worked with an agency about as useful as a chocolate teapot, and still showed the patience to get the project over the line as a true partnership.

An award for doing the work, usually in tiny teams, whilst trading in butter beans and straw for budget.

An award for not following the herd. For resisting the pressure to do what everyone else is doing - the high-fives, the fist bumps, and the tokenistic diversity that isn't representative of the people who actually work for you. Especially when you've got a board of 12... Who all happen to be white men.

An award for getting one honest sentence past legal and comms.

An award for deleting "we're like a family" from the careers site.

And an award for actually saying what it's really like to work for your organisation. The great stuff, but also the stuff that makes people want to cry sometimes, because let's face it, every company has that too and not nearly enough use it as a realistic mechanism for candidate self-selection.

What I'd ask the awards bodies to think about

Moaning is easy, so these are the changes I think might start shifting things in the right direction.

Cap the number of categories. Gen Z, Gen Alpha, Gen X. Where does it end? Fewer categories means fewer trophies, and each one means more.

No results award without before-and-after data. Qualitative, quantitative or both. If you didn't measure where you started, you can't prove how far you've come.

Judge pound for pound. In boxing, the pound-for-pound rankings try to say who'd be the best fighter if everyone weighed the same. Do the same here. Ask entrants to declare their budget and team size, and judge the impact relative to the resources they had. A team of two with a shoestring budget that moved the needle deserves to be judged differently from a team of 20 with a war chest.

Agree one way of judging the work. In some cases there's already a live link to the work alongside the write-up. If it's experiential and it's online, you often get a link to go and have a play with it. But judging it properly is another matter. The awards bodies try to put judges in categories where they have experience and credibility, but sometimes that's not possible.

Websites are a good example. Judges only have the front-end to go on, and people can be razzle-dazzled by gimmicks like animations. The real magic happens in the back-end:

• how data is processed and managed
• personalisation
• adaptation
• responsiveness
• surfacing the right content at the right time
• the right content against the right job, and the right job against the right content
• SEO, AEO and GEO optimisation

A lot of judges won't have deep experience of full-stack web design, from back end to front end, so it's really difficult. I don't have all the answers, but the awards bodies could come together and agree a shared way of assessing and benchmarking the work. They've probably got enough historical data between them to do something with it.

Cut the categories so judges have time. When I judged, there were so many categories that fatigue set in.

Publish how many entries each category got. A gold means more when it's one out of 40 than when it's one out of 1.

Don't give everyone on the shortlist a medal. If nothing in a category earns a gold, don't award one.

Put someone with a finance background on the results judging. They'll know the difference between ROI and reach.

Cheaper or free entry for smaller teams. The people doing bloody hard work on tiny budgets are often the ones who can't justify the entry fee. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it doesn't mean it hasn't made a sound.

Let's have the party

So let's have a party. Hire a lovely venue, some great bands, a couple of comedy acts and a DJ, and just come and party. People could pay half the price, and at least they'd know what they're getting. Everyone's equal, and you remove the apples-to-oranges competitive comparison altogether.

And before anyone says nobody gets budget signed off for a party - people get budget signed off for team events and team bonding all the time.

Let's have a drink. Let's raise a toast to everyone in this industry, because it's fucking hard. It's more with less, with the constant threat of "is my job going to be around in the next 6 to 12 months?! 😱"

Let's celebrate the resilience, the tenacity and the get-up-and-go it takes to get to work every morning and do your best under those circumstances.

Just don't make me pay somewhere between £2,800 and £4,950 plus VAT for a table of 10 at a hotel, so that peers who don't know my context, don't know my resources, and have a different opinion to me on what creativity, success and great look like, can judge my work.

So who's to blame?

Hey, we all want attention. We all want to be recognised. I mentioned the disease of ego earlier, and God do I know I can suffer from it. Look at some of the crap I share on LinkedIn to get noticed. Hey everyone - Yoo Hoo! Look at me. Like me. Love me. Pleeeeaaasssse!

I try my best to balance it with positive intent in that. I want to help this industry learn, develop and grow and it's fair to say I share a lot of my knowledge and experience for free. But there's also the selfish element. I want to be seen, heard, recognised and approached for business. I'd really struggle to believe anyone who says otherwise.

It's quid pro quo. We talk about value propositions all the time. I like to think I give more than I ask for, but I know I can sometimes be guilty of getting the balance wrong.

But I think the awards side of it has got to the point now where that need is being exploited.

I'm not sure who's to blame - the people pushing it or the ones buying it. Probably a bit of both, each feeding the other. The more people enter, the more categories appear, and the more categories appear, the more people enter. And I include myself in that, because I've entered too.

Celebrate each other. By all means, let's do it. God knows we deserve it. Just celebrate the industry, and leave the competition out of it.

Have you won one, judged one, or bought a table? I'd be interested to know where you stand. Come and tell me I'm wrong, challenge me, have the debate respectfully. Or, like I know others have done, call me out anonymously behind my back, block me on LinkedIn and assume I'm just trying to poo-poo the whole industry and everyone in it. When actually, that couldn't be further from the truth.

I'm trying to hold up the mirror and have the difficult conversation, so we can find a way to celebrate this industry's blood, sweat, tears, laughs, smiles and everything in between in a way that's more credible and fairer for everyone, without every kid on the playground needing to get a participation prize so someone somewhere can increase their profits for the privilege.