What does an award in HR mean to you?

People don’t get into HR because they want personal recognition – they do it because they like to dish out the praise. However, for just one night, maybe it’s time to raise a glass to yourself?

HRD Canada’s annual Canadian HR Awards is just around the corner, and as such we’re asking you – our dedicated audience – to nominate your HR heroes. We spoke to last year’s winner of the prestigious ‘Best Service Provider Award’, MaRS Discovery District, to see hear what taking home that prize meant to them.

“Winning this award meant that our startup tech clients see value in investing in their talent strategy and engage with us early in their business growth and often,” explained Daneal Charney, director of talent at MaRS Discovery District. “Our team was beyond thrilled that our clients choose us to solve for their attraction and retention pain points and help them build successful businesses. Canadian HR Awards elevate the important work that HR innovators and leaders are doing for their clients and customer community. HR leaders play a key role in leading the charge of all transformational happening in the workplace and should have a louder voice - from digital transformation to adoption of exponential technologies to re-skilling the workforce.”

We went on to ask Daneal what MaRS Discovery District has been working on since winning the award last year – and discovered it’s all systems go at the firm.

“We’ve launched the online version of our 3-month talent brand accelerator,” she told HRD Canada. “The first-of-its-kind experiential  program for scaling tech companies to hire better candidates than they do today by tapping into the a largely untapped pool of great talent – that’s 70% of the talent who are not actively looking for a new role but are open to hearing about innovative companies with a strong talent brand. Canada has become an attractive place for global talent and my team has helped many start-ups hire great tech talent as well as more recently C-Suite roles that are pivotal to the companies we service.”

Brought to you by Ultimate Software in partnership with HRD, the 2019 Canadian HR Awards boasts 24 categories, designed to recognize and celebrate the best of HR across Canada – awarding teams, individuals and companies the highest honour in the sector. Don’t forget to cement your place in the HR Hall of Fame, and nominate your champions now.