Who’s Got The Best Christmas Party This Year?

Good morning everyone and it’s a bright and breezy one today as I’m off to Greg Savage’s RCSA brekkie seminar in Auckland this morning.  Perhaps I will have already met many of you readers by the time you read this, who knows?  If you did then lucky you as today you have a double dose of Rice Consulting!

Anyway, it seems like it’s coming around to that time of year again.  Yes I believe this week is the official launch week for the Recruitment Company Christmas Parties!  That time of year where we can all let out a collective, and often drunken, sigh (belch?) of relief and joyously reflect back on a year of highs and lows in our crazy, quirky world of recruitment.

Already Directors will be sending out Memos reminding staff of appropriate behaviour at company events (many going on to flout those very same rules themselves).  Team-building games will be devised, flirtations will be planned, seating arrangements hatched and vegetarians counted.  Drinks will be drunk and, because it is 2010 and not 2009, Secret Santas will almost universally be more than $10 per person.

And, of course, arguments supressed and resentments harboured will eventually come forth with great gusto and ease of delivery…and someone will end up crying.

You gotta love it.

Hays Auckland Christmas Party circa. 2006 (shortly before Jason Walker got onto the Karaoke)…

So what will 2010 mean for your Christmas Party this year?  In 2009 you’d have been lucky to get some burnt offerings from the barbecue in your Director’s / Manager’s back yard.  I doubt your partners would have even been invited last year (which is a bad thing….ok?).

But 2010 already seems to have put the smile back on a number of recruitment leaders’ faces.  Beyond Recruitment  are kicking things off in style with their Christmas Party being held on this very day today with the Auckland team flying down to join their Wellington counterparts for a day of team-bonding followed by an evening in the flashy new waterfront bar “Foxglove” (apparently heavily frequented by Government Department CEOs and suchlike).

I also saw a tweet from Focus Recruitment that they will be popping over to Waiheke for a lunch at the Mudbrick Winery (in the helicopter Tony?)

So what are the rest of you up to this year?  Is anyone doing anything a little bit “different” or are we all going to just enjoy the fact we can run up a bar tab without sweating too profusely this year?

And if you’re not doing anything that flash don’t worry too much, here at Rice Consulting it’s dinner for two at the new restaurant round the corner.  Partners are invited.