Thu, 21 Feb 2013

Recruiters are being urged to play their part in defining internationally-agreed standards within HR and recruitment that will allow organisations to accurately compare the efficiency of their recruitment operations and processes with peer organisations across the world.  

The call comes from John Kells, vice president product management at US human capital management firm ADP, following a meeting in London, where representatives from 38 countries met to continue work on the establishment of international standards within HR and recruitment.

Kells, who is also the US-based convenor of an International Standards Organisation  (ISO) working group that last year created an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard for cost-to-hire, tells Recruiter that recruitment professionals have a great opportunity to shape the future of the industry.

He explains they can do this by contributing to the work on defining standards, methodologies and rules, including important recruitment metrics, such as cost-to-hire, time-to-hire and quality of hire.   

“They are going to be created somewhere and either HR/recruiting people can establish the standard, or someone else will. By going through the ISO methodology, the outcome doesn’t have a slant. It is not this person’s opinion, it is the opinion of the world.”

Kells explains that anyone interested in getting involved in this work should contact the British Standards Institution (BSI) by emailing [email protected] quoting ISO TC260 and explaining they would like to get involved in the formulation of the international standards.

Amanda Green, manager for HR standards at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), who is also working on the initiative, adds:

“Now is a good time to get involved because this is pretty new,” going on to tell Recruiter: “We are still charting the course so people who come on now can help determine which projects we are going to tackle first.”

Following the meeting, Kells says the stage is now set for more detailed work on defining an internationally-recognised standard for cost-to-hire. 

Kells adds that the end game is that recruitment and resourcing professionals will be able to use their own data to generate a metric for cost-to-hire, that will allow them to benchmark their own organisation's performance against others of similar size around the world.