Katrina wanted to enter the Queen’s Award for Enterprise (now the King’s Award), the toughest awards programme on the planet … so she needed help.
Join Talent called in Awards Intelligence, and we found Katrina an absolute joy to work with. We began with a series of calls and research sessions, brought extreme attention to detail to the project to match the QAE’s exacting requirements, and wrote the entry with an energy to reflect the company’s impressive achievements.
Telling a great story is fundamental to constructing a winning narrative for the King’s Award for Enterprise (KAE), and Katrina herself had an incredible story to tell. This is how we began: “Founder Katrina Hutchinson-O’Neill grew up in the latter troubles in Northern Ireland – 7 schools in 14 years for security reasons because her policeman father was a target for paramilitaries. She started as an agency temp and worked her way up over 15 years to CEO-2 in Financial Services, but repeatedly had to relocate for work – even leaving her and her husband’s ‘dream home’ to move to Scotland in 2012 with two toddlers plus a baby due. She founded Join Talent to reinvent embedded recruitment. This was a big step as the main breadwinner and with three young children – but she felt compelled not to be left thinking ‘what if’. She set up the company as a 100% remote business – well-paid careers for amazing humans wherever in the world they live, giving her team the success and stability for their own families she wanted for hers …”
Judges love personal input, overcoming obstacles and stories that are an inspiration to others, so this was a powerful start.
We then worked with Katrina to gather the metrics that would prove Join Talent’s success as the fastest-growing company in its sector in EMEA by a sizeable margin, with sustained hyper-growth over the previous three years. We made sure we included plenty of stats, such as: “Founded on a boot-strap basis in January 2019, Join Talent’s income has soared 2472% and headcount is up 3725% over the period of this entry” and, on staff engagement: “eNPS is measured monthly and consistently tracks at over 94 (we’re aiming for 100).”
We were careful to highlight USPs such as how the company invests more in training and development than any other brand in the sector and how clients only pay for the support they need – something no competitor could match. We chose the best quotes from a raft of testimonials, majoring on those showing how Join Talent had delivered quantifiable results for iconic clients such as Amazon, Booking.com and Deloitte.
The result
Every KAE entry is a mammoth effort, but it was worth the sweat. When the official announcement came that Katrina and the team had won, they were understandably over the moon. Join Talent was also swift to make maximum marketing capital out of its achievement with a dedicated page on its website, which notes: “The King’s Award for Enterprise – awarded through collaboration between the UK Government and His Majesty King Charles III – is the most prestigious award achievable by a UK business. It recognises our outstanding performance in international trade, as well as our further future ambitions to continue our growth in supporting our clients with the excellence of delivery across a global footprint.”
We’ve worked with Join Talent on two more landmark entries, showing the company at its very best to win the GB Entrepreneur Awards Scale-Up award and the Lloyds Bank Most Ambitious Business Leaders (LDC50) award in the Disruptor category. These wins made Katrina a prime candidate for the Top 100 Influential People award, for which we duly submitted another entry spotlighting her stellar talents. She won – and joined the 2023 list of “individuals of exceptional talent at the top of their game.”
“Navigating what is of importance to the judges regarding different awards is really challenging if you don’t have that knowledge. Also, telling your story in a way that avoids ‘industry jargon’ is a skill in itself! Awards Intelligence not only were an absolute pleasure to work with, but the knowledge and insight they brought regarding how to position our narrative was invaluable and undoubtedly a huge factor in our success. We are incredibly grateful to the Awards Intelligence team, and will absolutely be planning to work with them again in the future.”