Projects to standardise hiring across each sector and creating recognised standards for how employers use social media are among the initiatives announced by the Better Hiring Institute (BHI).

Outlining their plans last week at an online webinar, attended by Recruiter, board members of BHI revealed that a toolkit to standardise hiring in the care sector will be launched in September. It will offer “some standardisation around application forms, references, backgrounds and all sorts of different things to help that sector become more standardised in the way that they hire”, said BHI chair Keith Rosser. 

The care toolkit will be followed on an as yet undisclosed date, for a similar product to serve the financial services sector.

Rosser, also the director of REED Screening, told attendees that BHI are working with the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) on a review of “what recruitment is as part of their legislation or regulation – so how do they determine or define what a recruitment agency is in the future when so many are likely to be online apps, moving forward. The legislation currently around for the recruitment sector is really grounded in ‘bricks and mortar’ recruitment businesses, as they were probably several decades ago”. 

Rosser pointed out that significant innovation was currently taking place in the recruitment intermediary space with movement toward digital-only temporary recruitment agencies occurring in Europe, for instance. “We really want to understand what that means for workers moving forward,” he said. 

BHI are also looking at elements of pre-hiring and engaging with universities about the use and impact of artificial intelligence in recruitment. “We’ve noticed that trade unions this year have called for the right of all job applicants to have a human determine their suitability and not left to a machine. We don’t have a particular position on this yet,” Rosser said.

He noted that BHI is advocating strongly for the extension and continuation of the digital right-to-work checks for UK citizens. The current extension ends at the end of August, meaning that UK workers would have to have physical checks of their right-to-work documents.

Other BHI initiatives include:

• Creating recognised standards for how employers use social media to provide guidance on how to use information that “comes out of social media checks fairly and correctly”
• Digitalising qualification credentials
• Exploring the future of job advertisements and requirements
• Collaborating with Cifas on a recruitment guide for local authorities
• Advising government on closing deed poll loopholes that allow offenders who change their name to hide their identity.

• Comment below on this story. Or let us know what you think by emailing us at [email protected] or tweet us to tell us your thoughts or share this story with a friend.