Staff Domain wins Gold and Silver at the 2026 Stevie Awards for Great Employers
by Justin Pavsic, Co-Founder and CEO, Staff Domain
Staff Domain has won Gold in the Talent Acquisition & Retention Solution Provider of the Year category at the 11th Annual Stevie Awards for Great Employers, as well as Silver in the Employer of the Year (Business & Professional Services) category, recognising a People and Culture transformation with a measurable impact on employee retention.
Winners will be honoured at a ceremony on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, at the Pullman Paris Montparnasse in Paris, France.
I want to use these wins to say something plainer than most award announcements manage: we built our hiring model on the belief that speed and volume are the wrong things to optimise for, and this year’s results are the clearest evidence yet that the bet paid off.
Growth without loosening the standard
Recruitment placements grew 52.4% from 2024 to 2025.
That’s a real number, and in most staffing businesses, growth at that pace comes with a quiet cost: standards slip, screening shortens, and quality becomes something you promise rather than something you can prove. We wanted to know whether we could grow that fast without that trade-off. Average time-to-hire across some of the most specialised roles we place, including AI engineers, tax accountants, paralegals, and structural engineers, stayed under 24 days through the same period. Growth and rigor held at the same time.
That is the result I’m proudest of in this nomination, more than the growth number on its own.
The Grit Filter, and the cost of taking it seriously
The Gold award centres on the Grit Filter, our proprietary behavioural assessment framework. Embedded across the recruitment process, it evaluates candidates on traits linked to offshore success: accountability, communication, resilience, and growth mindset. It runs alongside standard technical screening, not instead of it.
The honest number behind that: approximately 30% of technically qualified candidates are rejected at the behavioural stage alone. Every one of those candidates could do the job on paper. We reject them anyway, because we’ve built this business on the view that technical competence tells you someone can do a role, not that they’ll thrive doing it offshore, managed remotely, for a client they may never meet in person. That’s a real cost in placement volume. We think it’s the right trade, and I’d make it again.
It would be easy to soften that number, or leave it out. We’re including it because I think the industry needs more companies willing to say plainly what quality actually costs, instead of treating it as a line in a brochure.
Verification as a discipline, not a checkbox
Recruitment quality is paired with verification. Every successful candidate goes through employment verification, professional reference checks, social media screening, and criminal record investigation before receiving an offer. We brought background investigations in-house this year to keep that standard consistent across every placement, rather than relying on a patchwork of third parties with varying levels of rigor. Staff Domain also holds ISO 27001 certification and is a certified Great Place to Work®, two markers we treat as a floor, not a headline.
What happens after the offer
The Silver award recognises the other half of the equation: what happens after someone is hired. Good assessment means nothing if the person we place isn’t developed, managed well, and given a real path to grow. That’s the retention side of the story, and it’s the reason we invest in the function long after the offer is signed, not just up to the point someone accepts one. A hire who joins well and is left to figure the rest out on their own is not a success story yet. It becomes one over the following year, through onboarding, a real manager relationship, and a career path that was planned rather than accidental.
Two wins, one argument
Together, these two wins reflect something I think the industry gets wrong more often than not. Growth and hiring rigour are usually treated as competing priorities in offshore staffing, because speed and volume are the easiest things to sell. I’d rather place fewer people well than place more people quickly.
This year, the judges agreed that’s not just a nice line, it’s a system that works, and the more than 700 professionals we placed across Australia, the UK, and the US this year is proof it works at real scale, not just in theory.
About the Stevie Awards
The Stevie® Awards, widely recognized as the world’s premier business awards, are nicknamed the Stevies, derived from the Greek word stephanos, meaning “crowned.” The Stevie Awards are conferred through nine programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, the Middle East & North Africa Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards®, The International Business Awards®, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, the Stevie Awards for Technology Excellence, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.
The Stevie Awards receive more than 12,000 nominations each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide.
