Fair recruitment

Operational Manual on Recruitment Costs – SDG 10.7.1

This Operational Manual on Recruitment Costs – SDG 10.7.1 aids in the collection and dissemination of data on recruitment costs and serves as a means of setting standards to produce comparable data across countries.

Recognizing that the high economic and social costs incurred by migrants are serious impediments to realizing sustainable development outcomes from international migration, the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, under its Goal 10.7, calls for facilitating orderly, safe, and responsible migration. Similarly, the high costs of recruitment paid by workers, particularly for low-skilled jobs, is increasingly identified as a persistent antecedent of workers’ abuse. The World Bank and ILO are the joint custodian agencies for SDG Indicator 10.7.1, expressed as “Recruitment costs borne by an employee as a proportion of monthly income earned in country of destination.”.

A set of Guidelines for the collection of Statistics for SDG Indicator 10.7.1 have been developed in 2018 and endorsed by national statistical offices in a first international consultative workshops in 2018 in Washington, and in Istanbul in 2019 where a preliminary draft of this operational manual, based on the Guidelines, was presented and discussed. The manual was finalized based on the discussions and valuable suggestions of the participants.

Within the framework of SDG Indicator 10.7.1, the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD) of the World Bank and the ILO have been collecting data on recruitment costs and simultaneously, developing methodologies and survey instruments that countries can employ to gather data on recruitment costs. This document relies and builds on this accumulated experience and is intended to serve as an operational manual in the collection and dissemination of data on recruitment costs and a means of setting standards to produce comparable data across countries. It therefore closely follows the ‘Statistics for SDG Indicator 10.7.1: Guidelines for their Collection’.