Members of the World Employment Confederation (WEC), an organization representing employment agencies, announced a blockchain initiative to streamline staffing operations. The project will explore standardization practices, to enable seamless sharing of data between the companies.
The blockchain initiative is being run by The Adecco Group, GiGroup, Kelly Services, ManpowerGroup, Randstad, and RGF Staffing. The firms have identified some common problems they face and potential solutions using distributed ledger technology (DLT).
An individual looking for a job has to provide information such as identity, qualifications, experience and certification. This information has to be vetted thoroughly by the employer, as well as the staffing company before an individual can be hired. The issue here is that every time a person wishes to switch jobs, they have to go through the document submission and verification process all over again. While being time-intensive, it also creates significant inefficiencies.
Through this WEC blockchain initiative, the participating companies will explore data privacy and data sharing across recruitment firms. However, data sharing is possible only if there is a standardized set of data. To address this problem, the project participants plan to develop standards for collecting data from candidates and workers. Primarily, it will form a standardized structure of a resume that will be used by the recruitment firms.
The announcement briefly mentions that the candidate, and not the company, owns the data collected during a recruitment process. This hints at a self-sovereign identity function, which could potentially be integrated with the blockchain.
Storing personal information directly on blockchains is frowned upon and in some regions, contrary to privacy regulations such as GDPR. But to use blockchain as a tool doesn’t mean the data itself is stored directly on a blockchain. Apart from leveraging self-sovereign identity, hypothetically, a blockchain could store a reference to private data shared p2p.
Meanwhile, the recruitment firms will also look at best practices to be followed as an industry, to enhance the experience for candidates, workers, and employers.
Lastly, the companies will explore other use cases based on blockchain.
Kelly Services already has some blockchain experience, and last year entered into a partnership with Moonlighting to access resumes from the latter’s Blockchain Profile Management System (BPMS).
Among other initiatives, talent manager Cornerstone, the National Student Clearinghouse, SAP, Upwork and 11 other organizations have founded a blockchain non-profit called Velocity Network Foundation. It is working on a blockchain platform called ‘Internet of Careers’ for employee credentialing.
