On September 10, 2001 the HR-XML Consortium announced that six leading staffing companies (Adecco, Kelly, Manpower, Randstad, Spherion, and Vedior) would submit a collection of XML-based Staffing Industry Data Exchange Standards (SIDES) to the consortium for review and further development. An initial draft specification for SIDES has now been made accessible via the project mailing list, together with draft XML DTDs and XML Schemas. The standards are needed because "requisitions for temporary staffing typically originate in the Purchasing Department rather than in the Human Resources department; one of the principal goals of the SIDES initiative is to allow the rich description of human resource requirements within standard e-procurement mechanisms. The objective of the Staffing Industry Data Exchange Standards 1.0 (SIDES) is to analyze and identify what data is currently being exchanged between Staffing Supplier Companies and Staffing Supplier Customers and to provide a basic standard for which the exchange of data can occur within the general staffing industry. SIDES supports nine payloads by providing full specification for each payload, defining its purpose and dependencies, and where each payload fits into the overall business process. The nine payloads defined in SIDES 1.0 include: Assignment; BackgroundCheck; ContactDetail; HumanResource; Invoice; Order; Qualification; StaffingAction; StaffingSupplier; StaffingSupplierCustomer; TrackingInformation.

From the announcement of 2001-09-10: "The objective of the Staffing Industry Data Exchange Standards is to provide a set of standard protocols for data transfer and exchange of information between the staffing industry, intermediaries and customers. This will improve efficiency and significantly reduce costs for the staffing companies, intermediaries and customers by dramatically reducing the need to design, build and implement separate, and potentially conflicting, data interfaces for the exchange of data between different applications and businesses... The sponsors of the initiative [Adecco, Kelly, Manpower, Randstad, Spherion and Vedior] are the world's six leading staffing companies, who have worked collaboratively for the first time in their history to develop an extensive specification, which has been donated to the HR-XML Consortium for review, revision, and implementation..."

Related HR-XML activity: Project Proposal: Background Checking Workgroup. Project Scope: "The purpose of this project is to review and describe the 'Background Checking' domain and to produce one or more schemas that will enable the exchange of data related to background checking. At a minimum, the workgroup will develop DTDs/schemas to support background checks requests from employers (or more generically BGCheckConsumers) as well as DTDs/schemas to support the return of background check reports from vendors of background check services (BGCheckSuppliers). The DTDs/Schemas will be developed to support a variety of types of background checks, such as checks relating to criminal records, education, employment history, and credit worthiness..."