New Protocol Crosses Language Barriers - Staffing Exchange Protocol

Collaboration--not competition--in HR-XML

Consortium nets early results.

Think there's no advantage in rushing to adopt new technology? Consider this: In less than two weeks, Enron Corp., the Houston-based energy trading and distribution company, engineered a software interface between its recruitment tracking application and the web site its employee-referral program vendor provided. How did it manage such a feat? By using the new Staffing Exchange Protocol (SEP).

Launched in March 2001 by the HR-XML Consortium Inc., of Raleigh, N.C., the protocol uses HR-XML, a form of Extensible Markup Language (XML). "Without HR-XML the interface would have been more difficult and taken longer," says Meg Wysatta, Enron's manager of recruitment technology. "We probably cut the time in half."

The HR-XML Consortium is a non-profit alliance of more than 125 corporations, HRMS developers, HR applications vendors, application service providers (ASPs), recruiting services and others (including the Society for Human Resource Management). The 2-year-old consortium is leading an industrywide effort to create data exchange standards for various HR processes. Its goal is to develop an entire vocabulary of HR specific XML-based data objects and schemas 50 HR technologists can exchange data using standard formats. SEP, for example, includes schemas for job requisition, job candidate and candidate feedback.

XML is a slimmer, web-compatible version of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a complex language for defining document formats. Unlike its cousin, HyperText Markup Language (HTML), XML can convey display instructions and describe the content of just about any type of file, including text, web pages, spreadsheets, database files and graphics. By describing content with great specificity, XML enables automated data exchange without custom programming.

Early adopters have used the technology to create applications that interface with thirdparty providers, track resumes and manage internal human capital. SEP is the first of several planned protocols. The consortium recently released an upgraded version of SEP and plans to release a benefits enrollment protocol later this year. The group also is developing time card, payroll and other protocols.

In a recent survey of 272 companies, Cutter Information Corp. of Arlington, Mass., found more than three-fourths used XML. To develop the language, there must be agreement on the specific object tags and data schemas. Many groups are working on standard XML tags and schemas for specific industries or cross-industry areas.

The HR-XML Consortium is the first group to build schemas and tags for HR. The consortium has working groups for recruiting, compensation and benefits, and payroll, as well as for objects required across domains. For example, almost every process will need a tag for the "person" object that must be consistent throughout. HR-XML released tags for "person/name" and other cross objects this summer. (For more details, see the consortium's web site at www.hr-xml.org.)

SEP is the first big push for HRXML. "We're still in the early adoption phase," says Chuck Allen, the consortium's director. "The rate of adoption and the amount of interest in implementing our specifications continues to grow."

Making a Good Site Better

Cisco Systems Inc. hires about half of its new employees from candidates recruited via its jobs page, which handles about 50,000 resumes and registers 3.5 million hits each month. The original system let the San Jose, Calif., networking company collect only a basic resume as plain text or word-processing file and put it in a resume database, says Todd Spain, Cisco's IT manager for workforce management systems. Resumes could be searched, but a manual intervention was needed to search for candidates based on detailed skill-set requirements.

"We're looking for very specific talent sets," Spain says. "We want to be able to mine our applicant pool for the top 5 to 10 percent of talent." The new SEP standard will help the company do that.

Cisco is designing a data model based on SEP, and it is also developing a resume builder that will enable applicants to create an XML-compliant resume at the web site. The resume builder will use discrete fields that map to the new data model. It also will accept resumes created off the site if they are based on the HR-XML staffing protocol.

Cisco, a member of the HR-XML Consortium, is encouraging others to adopt the new protocols, Spain says. The company asks new vendor candidates--recruiters, job sites and others--if they have adopted or plan to adopt HR-XML, Spain says. "We want to make sure they are planning to adopt it," he says. "We take this to heart. Having an industry agree on one interchange standard is just better for everybody."

An Internal Solution

Although the protocol was designed for recruitment data exchange, Accenture Ltd. of New York uses SEP to manage its internal consulting talent. The company's success relies on its ability to match the skills of 70,000 employees in 46 countries with its specialized consulting requirements, says Mohit Sahgal, a senior manager at Accenture.

Employees spend a great deal of time with HR staff, making sure the skill sets reflected on their resumes are current. "It is incumbent on each person to update their resume at the end of each engagement if not during it," Sahgal says. HR staff make sure they are accurate and complete, then enter the information into Accenture's global scheduling database. Searching the database is not easy because it uses proprietary formats that only the HR staff are trained to use. HR practitioners effectively functioned as middleware.

To create a standard resume format, Accenture contracted with Novient Inc., an Atlanta-based software developer whose Novient eServices helps service companies plan for and optimize staff use. Accenture and Novient implemented SEP, which allows employees to access and update their resumes via the corporate intranet. The protocol also lets scheduling managers search the data.

Accenture's new system includes an SEP-based resume builder that lets employees capture project history, roles, skills learned, situations encountered and similar information. "Before we jumped off the deep end in defining our own XML schemas, we said there has to be a schema out there that helps us," Sahgal says. That's when Accenture learned about HR-XML.

The Novient software, which now is XML-compatible, enables detailed searches. An example: A user can determine how many people have used a particular software tool in the past year on specific assignments, rated themselves with a certain proficiency level and are interested in doing more with that tool. "Previously, we couldn't tell with accuracy who had specific skills at some of our larger clients," Sahgal says.

"We're now having a lot of discussions about joining the consortium and helping to drive the standards," Sahgal adds.

Crossing the Atlantic

While HR-XML members are predominantly from the United States, some European employers are adopting the new protocol. One such firm is JobPartners Ltd., based in London. The company markets Active Recruiter, an ASP-based recruitment package.

Active Recruiter uses SEP to exchange information with recruiting sites on the web and to integrate it with the HRMS used by its customers.

Paul Bannister, chief technology officer at JobPartners, says the big issue for customers and for the job sites is mapping data and data fields among partners. "If they're all using HR-XML, it gets easier," he says.

JobPartners was one of the first overseas firms to join the HR-XML consortium, which held its first European meeting in April 2001. Representatives from more than 100 organizations attended, and the consortium is planning a second meeting in Europe this month. Designing protocols for a global audience is challenging, not only because of language differences, but also because recruiting practices and policies vary widely, Bannister says.

For example, SEP includes a data field for grade point average, which generally has a consistent meaning in the United States, but each European country has its own way of rating academic achievement. For example, France uses a numerical scale of 1 to 20, in which the lowest number is best; Germany uses an ascending scale of 1 to 5. JobPartners and other European members want to influence later versions of the protocol to give users flexibility, Bannister says.

JobPartners has rolled out the SEP-based Active Recruiter to only a handful of customers and job sites, Bannister says. One hurdle: Companies that recently adopted technology without XML aren't inclined to upgrade their systems immediately. Bannister expects adoption to take place over several years as those sites replace outmoded systems.

Linking Partners

Enron's experience with SEP illustrates the potential of adopting a standard protocol. The company used SEP to build interfaces between its resume-tracking application and its employee-referral program vendor, Referral Networks Inc., of New York. Enron also used SEP in the interfaces between its resume-tracking application and middleware, and between the middleware and Enron's HRMS from SAP. Because Enron, Referral Networks, the resume-tracking application vendor and SAP all adopted SEP, the data is compatible with each package.

About 12 percent of Enron's candidate referrals come from its employees--and about 30 percent of its workers come from the referral pool. Before SEP, Enron's employee-referral program relied on a paper-based process, which was too cumbersome for most employees, Wysatta says. Enron rolled out the SEP-based system in May, which simplified referrals, tracking data collection on new employees. Wysatta said she hopes the change will increase participation in the employee-referral program.

Enron was not a member of the consortium when it adopted SEP, but Wysatta had been paying attention to the group's work. Enron likely will become a member because of its experience with SEP, she says. "It's great when people can come together and agree on something."

Quick Progress

Setting aside competitive issues, especially between vendors, to develop standard tags and schemas, has let the consortium produce results, members of the working groups say.

"The Internet has enabled much easier collaboration across enterprise boundaries," says David Ludlow, director of product management for SAP's MySAP HR product. "The ability to pass data back and forth offers some great promise to allow people to be more productive. The consortium has been a great medium to enable some of this collaboration."

Bill Roberts is a freelance writer based in Los Altos, Calif., who covers business, technology and management issues.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Society for Human Resource Management
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group