Onrec Awards Ceremony 2008

I was at the Onrec awards on Wednesday night.  They took place at Cafe Royal in London.  It's a really nice venue (the lifts with carpets up the walls were rather 1930s).  The food was really good and Onrec had pulled quite a crowd (just short of 400 attendees).  I'd been invited by Tim and Alastair at Enhance Media and joined their other guests at table 23.  I have to say the actual awards ceremony was all over in rather a rush with no Oscar's style acceptance speeches.  Although there was a little good humoured heckling from some of the losing nominees.  In many of the categories I didn't have a particular "winner" in mind.  It was nice to see GuardianJobs.co.uk pick up the Best Technical Innovation Award - Generalist.  I should also mention Bond's Innovative Offline Marketing Award - Supplier (as they advertise with us!).  It was a real shame when Enhance didn't win in their category (Onrec Education Award), although they couldn't have lost to a better company - as Broadbean won.  It was the final award of the night that I was waiting for with baited breath - The Onrec Personality of the Year award.  As I know nearly all the nominees personally (and one would expect them to be fairly well known!) I found myself cheering for most as their names were announced.  However, Dan at Broadbean has to have a special place in my heart (as co-sponsor of our networking events).  The winner was (one of the two nominees that I had never met before that evening) John Benson of eFinancialCareers.com.  For those of you less familiar with John here is a little about him:

John Benson founded eFinancialCareers in 2000 with the aim of building the web’s leading job board brand for the banking and finance industry. eFinancialCareers helps financial institutions engage with and recruit financial professionals around the world from a single job board platform. 

From the outset John was keen to grow the business internationally, launching a site in France in 2003 and then acquiring a US job board as spring-board for the launch of eFinancialCareers in the US in 2004.  Now, with a global team of more than 80 people operating from offices in London, New York, Singapore and Sydney, eFinancialCareers ... is considered to be the web’s leading finance-dedicated jobsite brand.  Over the years John has spoken at online recruitment conferences in Europe, the US and Asia-Pac. 

I plan to try and tempt John to contribute to the UKRecruiter community - rather like a Miss World doing the rounds in her winning year (I hope that bizarre analogy doesn't offend him!).

Of course it was a shame for Dan (who seemed to have perked up by the time we got the unofficial after-awards party) and the other nominees. I saw Mark Kieve and David Morgan being subjected to equal measures of commiserations and mikey taking abuse.  Ian Partington was there, drowning his sorrows, but sadly I can't publish the quote he generously offered me for my blog.  Finally, Dan asked me to mention that even though John was the winner on the night, Dan had been the people's choice!

Congratulations to you both, Dan and John; and to all the other winners from the awards.