Business has long understood that developing the skills and competencies of its specialists, as well as the introduction of the latest technologies and tools for the HR industry is a necessary investment in the success of the company. People are the generators and implementers of ideas that help businesses achieve key goals. And HR specialists provide this complex system with the talents necessary for its effective operation.
Since its foundation in 2020, the HR Pro Association has focused its efforts on creating favorable conditions for strengthening the Ukrainian HR community. The team is the official provider of the world leader in human capital management, SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management). Thanks to this partnership, Ukrainian HR specialists have managed to build a reliable bridge to the best international practices. The HR Pro Association highlights the importance of HR in companies, develops professional competencies and provides unique opportunities for its members. The team develops and implements specialist development programs and introduces the best world standards in the field of human resource management. Therefore, the Ukrainian HR community has long been a part of the big world. We not only adopt the practices of colleagues from other countries but are also ready to share unique experience. The first HR Pro Awards in Ukraine became exactly such a platform for presenting innovative projects, talents and developments. The event was organized by those who have been strengthening Ukrainian business for many years, namely:
- the association of HR professionals – HR Pro,
- the first online platform for job search in Ukraine – robota.ua.
And Microsoft’s Gold Partner for the development, implementation and support of business process automation systems – SMART business – created the interface for the HR Pro Awards participants and experts’ account.
Thanks to the synergy of such powerful players in the domestic and international markets, the team of like-minded people managed to create a truly significant event for the Ukrainian HR community.
The prerequisites that became the key driver for creating our own Ukrainian award for CEOs and HR specialists
The creation of such a grand award was a logical step that had to summarize the long-term process of forming the Ukrainian community of HR professionals. The HR Pro organization, together with its international partners, has long been directing its resources to training and developing specialists who work daily with the most important capital of business – people. The association maintains constant contact with those it certifies and proudly monitors the results of its intellectual investments in people who are close in spirit and worldview. HR specialists with whom the organization cooperates always share how their teams are strengthening and growing, how their business is scaling and what incredible projects are behind it. The HR Pro team wanted to take these achievements beyond the association, share them at the all-Ukrainian level. This would give industry representatives the opportunity to adopt the valuable experience of colleagues, learn new practices, get inspired and inspire others. Moreover, HR professionals are open people who are better able to hear others and strive to be heard themselves. It is not for nothing that well-developed interpersonal skills are considered to be the competencies of a professional HR specialist. That is, the idea was not only in formally distinguishing high achievements, but also in creating an event where businesses could evaluate different approaches and practices for solving a wide range of problems related to human resource management:
Of course, the idea of creating an award did not appear out of nowhere. The HR Pro team has long been an integrator of high-quality standards for Ukrainian HR specialists. Therefore, the creation of the award was an opportunity to evaluate the results of our own work as part of the overall contribution of all industry representatives. We clearly understood that our community had something to share and talk about not only within the association, because the community is developing far beyond our organization. The award was conceived as a tool for identifying new talents and reinforcing leadership of experienced players in the market.
Thus, the creation of the HR Pro Awards was preceded by the goal of expanding and strengthening the Ukrainian community of HR professionals and showing company owners how important the HR team is in achieving strategic goals. In addition, the organizers wanted participation in the award itself to allow specialists to receive a number of benefits for their companies:
- formation and strengthening of a successful employer brand, since the award is widely publicized among the business community and in the media,
- strengthening the reputation of an innovative player in the labor market,
- useful interaction with representatives of the business audience of Ukraine and the world,
- recognition and reinforcement of one’s contribution to the HR industry,
- obtaining unique knowledge and gaining the experience of colleagues,
- assessment of one’s own and others’ advantages within the framework of healthy competition,
- promotion of one’s own services.
In addition, requests for the creation of a special award were regularly received from HR specialists themselves. The co-organizer of the HR Pro Awards, robota.ua, told us more about this.
The company has been helping employers find talents in the labor market since 2000 and has long since received the status of a trusted companion among tens of thousands of HR specialists throughout Ukraine:
robota.ua became a pioneer among Ukrainian companies in providing an online service for employment. Now we offer employers the largest resume database in Ukraine and are an HR-tech company providing a full range of services in this area: from standard job posting packages to more complex and technical features. Of course, to implement effective projects and tools, we always communicate with our B2B clients to take into account their wishes and develop effective solutions. Therefore, having a high level of trust among employers, we often received requests to create an event that would highlight our common contribution to the development of the HR community. And the award could also identify the “pains” that specialists face and unite the community around their solution. Therefore, we had no right not to listen to our people. As a result, together with the partner HR Pro, it was decided to bring the idea to life, because we understood the importance of sharing experience and unity, which is inherent in Ukrainians.
How the concept of the award was formed and what criteria became key in the search for partners
The HR Pro team regularly participated in international summits and conferences from the SHRM partner, so they already had a good idea of how events of such a large scale are organized. This experience made it clear what a difficult and painstaking work the team of organizers will have to do, and that without reliable partners it will be extremely difficult to implement the award.
Thanks to the HR community and teamwork, this project was made so high-quality. Everyone shared our passion and eagerness to implement everything at the highest level. Naturally, first, we sought to develop a methodology, a reliable mechanism for submitting applications, moderation and the most objective evaluation system.
The robota.ua team, using vast experience in communicating with HR specialists, actively participated in the formation of the concept of the award and the development of scenarios. The company has long been a center of HR expertise.
robota.ua regularly forms detailed analytics of the labor market based on research, studies and surveys, sharing its expert assessment with employers. The company has its own media platform Budni, where it talks about recruiting and HR management trends, publishes interviews with experts and much more:
Both teams of organizers had a clear vision of what the award should look like. We understood that the specificity of the event was the competitive basis: there are winners and there are those who lacked just 1-2 points, because the projects will be presented by the best of the best, and there will essentially be no losers. That is, the value of the award is not only from the victory, but also from the participation itself, since significance will be attached to each project. We set ourselves rather ambitious deadlines and understood that we needed an automated solution to optimize and organize many processes. Therefore, together with the HR PRO team, we came to an agreement that we should attract an experienced partner in digitalization, which is what SMART business has become.
It was not by chance that the SMART business team joined the co-organization of the HR Pro Awards, since for more than five years one of the key areas of the company’s activity has been the development of the HR industry. This is confirmed by the development of a special comprehensive solution SMART HCM & LMS based on Microsoft technologies. The system is designed to build a modern HR ecosystem. It was the implementation of this innovative solution that allowed many successful companies to optimize the entire range of their HR tasks: from recruiting to powerful HR analytics. Therefore, trust in SMART business products and confidence in the team’s expertise played a key role in choosing a partner for the automation of the award. From this point on, painstaking work began on creating the HR Pro Awards Internet portal, which had to ensure:
- Automation of entering and calculating points: it was important for the award organizers that the points did not have to be entered somewhere in different documents and then manually re-entered. An automated approach eliminates human errors and simplifies and speeds up the evaluation process,
- Availability of a convenient personal account for participants and experts: with convenient submission of applications, with the function of editing and creating drafts and stage-by-stage evaluation,
- The ability for participants to download applications for coordination with the rest of their team,
- Functionality for downloading evaluation results for independent auditors who could accurately do the “math” of the results: the correctness of the jury’s actions and the display of key data,
- Convenient intuitive functionality, without unnecessary windows and with one consolidated workspace,
- Saving and protecting the confidentiality of information by storing data in a cloud environment.
As a result, the SMART business team implemented all the wishes of the organizers in just two months, creating a unique portal HR Pro SMART business, based on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform. The solution fully coped with all the tasks set, ensuring that the HR Pro award was held at the highest level.
Results of the first award and transformation of HR Pro Awards into the “Alley of Perseverance”
The first HR Pro Awards ceremony was held in November 2021. More than 130 applications from participants passed through the HR Pro SMART business digital portal, which were evaluated by more than 30 experts. The well-thought-out architecture of the system made it possible to automate the process of submitting applications, their moderation, audit, and, most importantly, contributed to an impartial evaluation. The SMART business team understood that the participants who came to share their progressive solutions expect the award to be organized at the same highly professional level. Therefore, when developing the portal, the team focused on three priorities:
- Technology, which includes a high level of data protection, ensuring efficient user experience in the system, support for analytics and reporting for collecting, analyzing and structuring information. And the portal should also be flexible for scaling, taking into account the prospect of growth of the award,
- Transparency – thanks to the distribution of user rights by roles and the well-thought-out logic of the selection stages, the portal ensures the accuracy and objectivity of the evaluation. This approach eliminates the possibility of the intersection of personal interests of participants and experts,
- User-friendly interface – covers intuitive functionality. The UX design of the portal is thought out in such a way that it seems familiar to users and leaves no doubts about what action pressing a particular button will lead to.
As a result of the enormous work, the award presented eleven winners in the categories “Projects” and “Personalities”. The event gained sincere recognition of the HR community and provided a significant contribution to the popularization of Ukrainian projects and the publicity of the talents behind them:
The award nominations were formed taking into account where the role of HR is the most important and influential. The variety of projects and approaches to work that we saw amazed us. I am sure that the award has fulfilled its mission: to show and prove that the practices of HR specialists are inextricably linked with the key business processes of companies. We are convinced that it is people who hold a business together, therefore, where it is focused on people, the growth of results and scaling of the company occurs much more intensively.
It would seem that a new good tradition was started among the HR community, and after the first HR Pro Awards, one should prepare for the next one. However, a full-scale war changed all plans, but did not destroy them!
In 2022, it was decided to temporarily postpone the award in the format in which it was launched. Business was going through very difficult times during this period, and the entire focus was shifted not to development and improvement: it was purely about survival. Domestic companies, like the Ukrainian people, began to unite their efforts to survive. But, as they say: in difficult times, strong people are born, and we’d also add that these people create strong initiatives.
Hundreds of thousands of companies across Ukraine have been contributing to the Victory since the first days of the war, and the HR Pro Association together with robota.ua sought to capture these feats. Thus, the HR Pro Awards was transformed into the “Alley of Perseverance”: without nominations and first places, without a jury and points, where everyone is a winner. The idea was for businesses to share their practices in preserving teams, supporting employees who took up arms, their volunteer activities and other useful initiatives caused by the war on social networks. Thus, the HR community, thanks to active sharing, could exchange new experiences, inspire and motivate others not to give up. Companies actively picked up the idea and under the #hproawards hashtag created a common space filled with team and personal feats of business representatives.
For each case described in the post, robota.ua donated for a car for the 501st separate marine battalion. As a result, the project collected more than 170 stories of work perseverance. In social networks, the posts of invincibility received more than 8,000 likes, 577 comments and more than 1,500 reposts. And most importantly, thanks to active involvement and donations, which were joined by the SMART business team, a combat vehicle was purchased for the defenders. “Alley of Perseverance” showed that Ukrainian business does not stand aside in difficult times – it continues to produce new useful and creative projects that bring victory closer. Such projects were noted in a special nomination in the second HR Pro Awards.
Projects caused by the war and the unique experience of the Ukrainian HR community, which is becoming a trendsetter for the global business community
Despite the full-scale war, Ukrainian business began to actively scale up to European markets. Vivid examples of strategic expansion in the EU were Nova Poshta, Lviv croissants, Chornomorka, Liki24, Solmar, Smartass and many other companies. What is this if not a manifestation of invincibility, when they are trying to destroy us, and we are expanding the presence of Ukrainian brands in the leading countries of the world? Such a positive trend became possible thanks to professional HR specialists and CEOs focused on people. In a difficult period, they made every effort to preserve the business, because these specialists were faced with relocations, numerous layoffs, psychological support for employees, loss of talent, geographical dispersal of teams, restructuring of processes with adaptation to blackouts and air raid alerts, huge financial losses, etc. And those who overcame all these difficulties, managed to stabilize business processes and be reborn even stronger, had something to talk about through their new projects. Therefore, in 2023, the second HR Pro Awards took place:
In difficult times, we continued to keep in touch with the HR community, join charity initiatives and create our own ones. Before our eyes, industry specialists created incredible projects, and we understood that now Ukrainian business is a trendsetter in the international arena, and HR Pro Awards can become a mouthpiece that will amplify the voice of our community. In addition, we felt that the award is a motivational center – a place of strength and inspiration for others.
More than fifty companies expressed their desire to take part in the second award, and more than one hundred applications and eighty projects were registered on the award portal developed by the SMART business team. At the same time, 36 projects were caused by the full-scale war and aimed at overcoming the challenges associated with it. It is important to emphasize the charitable basis of the second award, where 30% of each application for participation was transferred to the Children of Heroes fund. In this way, the organizers sought to convey the importance of investing in the younger generation – those who are the future of our country.
The “Absolute Sense of Mission” project of the agricultural company Syngenta, which won in the “Perseverance and Charity” nomination, should also be noted. In fact, this is a complex project with a large number of charitable initiatives, including the creation of a fund to support the company’s employees, huge humanitarian and financial support for the military, civilian and medical spheres. The Syngenta team became a key participant in the all-Ukrainian “Victory Gardens” and “BORSCH” campaigns, aimed at supporting agribusiness and communities whose crop yields were most affected by the war.
Another winner in the “Perseverance and Charity” nomination was Nova Poshta with the “Ours for Ours” project. The team developed and implemented a program that allows them to cover absolutely all the needs of their mobilized colleagues. This allowed them to form a strong volunteer community within the company with their own movement leaders.
Considering security, the project presentations were held online. Therefore, if you missed the conference, you can always watch the recording.
HR Pro Awards is an opportunity to gain experience and insights that we would probably never have learned about if it weren’t for the award. Thanks to the HR Pro Awards, our company has collected information for market analysis, so to speak, from the primary source, allowing us to create effective product solutions for the HR industry. Events of such scale and level of organization strengthen our HR community, which has proven that the business is not just working but is transforming and growing. Thus, we attract the attention of investors, strengthen the feeling of reliability and trust in Ukrainian companies, replenishing the personnel deficit that occurred due to significant migration of workers.
The success of the HR Pro Awards has already inspired the HR community from Azerbaijan, which has adopted the experience of organizing the event from its Ukrainian colleagues. Consequently, the HR Pro Awards will continue to develop: attract more and more companies to participate, expand the circle of partners and spread beyond Ukraine. The organizers strive to make our projects known abroad, because this creates favorable conditions for the expansion of Ukrainian companies into international markets.
SMART business, the award automation partner, has already discussed with the organizers the possibility of localizing the award portal in English to help attract specialists and experts from other countries. SMART business solutions are distinguished by their flexibility for improvement and extension of functionality due to the modularity of the platforms. Developments based on Microsoft technologies are friendly to integration with other systems, which significantly expands the range of possibilities of the working environment. Therefore, the portal for HR Pro Awards was created based on these innovative principles, because SMART business believed that the award would grow, and the system should meet these high standards:
We have a wide range of informed customers who invest their time and resources in the development of the HR department, receiving high employee engagement, the best conditions for the professional growth of specialists and increased competitiveness. As a result, this makes the brand a real love mark – for both clients and employees. SMART business has long been helping companies develop an effective HR ecosystem with the help of our own SMART HCM & LMS solution. And we, as partners of the HR Pro Awards, were incredibly pleased to see our customers among the participants. We are proud that they were able to become innovators in their field, because innovation is our common value.
Learn more about SMART business solutions and services, that can optimize the processes of the HR department of your company, by submitting a request now:
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