Most people here know already that any kind of award function is a scam, but perhaps you are not aware of how truly insidious the awards industry truly is and the motives behind it. All awards should be viewed with the highest scepticism as the parasitical leeching that they are.
Most, if not all awards, are an elevated form of corporate circlejerking for money and favour. This is true all the way from Hollywoke glam ceremonies televised globally to the bottom rungs taking place in your town or city. For this thread we will focus on the latter.
Every insignificant industry you could ever care to think of has its own little bullshit awards, but they are especially prevalent in middle-man parasite jobs like estate agents, insurance salesmen, and recruiters. These industries are only a degree removed from pyramid schemes.
Industry award events are businesses at best and their basic operating level is to make money from the event. They will organise a “Wedding Planner of 2020” award then contact companies beforehand to invite them to the show and share the good news they’ve been selected.
Companies will then be invited to fill in a participation form and submit a registration fee to be included in the event. That gives them entry. If they wish to win these bullshit awards then the modus operandi is to ask the company to “sponsor” a table.
2 or 3 tables of 10 people will normally secure a company “Best Marketing Agency of the Year” award. The award company makes money, the crappy hotel where the event is held makes money, the marketing agents get drunk and their PR team posts the photos online the next day.
This is only the basic tier of this racket. I’d like to share more on the implications of these events. Some of these events companies organise these events just to make money, but others have a more insidious purpose: establishing themselves as a fake overseer on the industry.
A great racket to make even more money is to declare oneself the authority or standards watchdog of an industry. If you can convince agents and companies that sending you annual membership fees for their made-up authority is important than its far more profitable than 1 ceremony.
Let’s say recruitment agents have a bad scammy rep. So you set up a “Recruitment Professionals Association”, create a website saying that all your members are ethical pros, offer some bullshit certificate mislabelled as “training”, and charge $5,000 per annum for membership.
How do you sign up these people to your scam association in the first place? With an awards ceremony! Would-be nominees have to register to participate, then you earn money from the fees and the event AND set yourself up as a new authority in your industry!
It works because it appeals to corporate narcissism. Corporate bugpeople love awards because it allows them to feel that their lives have meaning even when they knowingly hand over the sponsorship money. It’s a form of mass self-delusion.
Not only that, but these entirely bogus awards can then be used to haze naive young people into working for these companies - mostly grossly underpaid. That’s why these awards are so prevalent in miserable hard-nosed sales industries with low commission-based salaries.
“Work for us! Sure we only pay commission and the KPIs are unrealistic, but look! We were awarded ‘Best Medium-Sized Financial Advisory To Work For In 2018’ so we must be legit. Oh, you’ll have to pay for your own uniform too.”
This racket runs DEEP. Institutions you think of as respectable are all in on this. Every year the UK Sunday Times runs a “Best Companies To Work For List”. Go take a look at some of the previous years and note the crazy number of random small recruitment agencies in the list.
They don’t give money to the Times blatantly to be on the list, but you can bet your life that the companies in the list will have advertising with the paper. Marketing departments love this: it gives them an advertising budget and they use the ranking/award as a job well done.
There’s an element of social engineering to this too. If a criteria requires companies on the list to have 60% female managers then that’s what the companies have to do. Do you think rankings of business school MBAs are based on merit alone or on how much their graduates earn?
Well, you’re wrong. Schools are constantly playing catch-up to the demands set by whoever creates the ranking. Maybe the “authority” says that rankings will now be 30% based on how many lesbians a school has. The school then has to rush to fulfill the req to maintain top ranking.
Speaking of rankings, an associated racket you should also be wary of is Glassdoor: the self-declared neutral and anonymous website that ranks how good companies are to work for. Independent, unbiased and neutral they are certainly not.
Glassdoor basically runs on a Mafia-style shakedown model. Yelp is the same but with restaurants. Typically, when your company gets a few bad reviews on Glassdoor (which is normal cos most people who would write on it are the disgruntled), you’ll get a call from their sales team.
The friendly Glassdoor man will point out that you have unfavourable reviews on their site, but by paying a fee and becoming an “engaged employer” you can make these reviews magically disappear.
Glassdoor/Yelp can boost your business, promote positive reviews, downgrade/delete negative reviews and I’m convinced will even write negative reviews on your rivals. Each of these services cost a fee. They probably even write the initial bad reviews as an excuse to get in touch.
They will deny publicly to the ends of the earth that they engage in such activities, but I can assure you they do. Always always question the legitimacy of any authority who claims to judge the merit or ranking of anything. Best rule of thumb is that it’s all biased.
Let’s end on a quick example that illustrates perfectly the lies within lies of how organisations confer legitimacy on each other. Glassdoor - which claims to be an independent ranker of employer best practices - is owned by a HR company called Recruit Holdings.
The largest job listings site in the US is https://t.co/SSsVoJVjI3. As a “benefit” to its users they helpfully display the company’s Glassdoor rankings next to the job advert so you know whether to apply or not. The owner of
indeed.com
“But Glassdoor must be legit! They won a Social Media Innovation Award in 2013 which they proudly state on their Wikipedia page!” The fact that the award was bestowed by a company called ‘Red Herring’ tells you all you need to know really.
PS: A reader from the legal profession tells all. (Also I would like to state here that @Steve_Sailer won the Boomer Tournament of 2019 fairly and squarely with no money changing hands beforehand)
