A Study On Benchmarking Application In Human Resource Management In Public Sectors

With the rise of New Public Management, public sectors set off a wave of learning advanced management methods from private sectors. Benchmarking which was born in private sectors is a product of New Public Management. Because benchmarking can improve an organization’s performance to a certain degree, the application of benchmarking in public sectors began to rise in the1990s.The term "benchmark" refers to a criteria or performance standard which is set by an organization to improve its performance and lead to the best practice. So benchmark is actually an issue about performance. Benchmarking is widely used in public sectors, especially abroad, where the application of benchmarking is relatively more mature and a theoretical system has been developed. On the basis of reviewing and discussing the relevant theories, the author finds out some problems existing in human resource management of public sectors, and presents a framework design about benchmarking’s application from levels of strategy, technology and arts, and builds the overall procedures of benchmarking practice. The author concludes three benchmarks according to different stages. In terms of the functions of human resource management, the author builds a series of benchmark systems and benchmark instructions to guide human resource managers in their practical work.It is innovative for the paper to study benchmarking’s application to public sectors of human resource management. Since nowadays it is rare to use benchmarking in human resource management in public sectors, and most researches study benchmarking only from the perspective of performance instead of human resource management as a whole. The paper establishes "three benchmarks" and "three levels" as well as a series of benchmark systems, which not only consider the characteristics of benchmarking, but also highlight the characteristics of public sectors. Therefore, a study on benchmarking application in human resource management in public sectors is feasible and significant.