Analysis of existing policy documents in all three project partner countries, other European Area of Higher Education (EHEA) countries and at the European level shows that there is a strong need to encourage and support Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in developing more significantly their Human resources management (HRM) systems, in order to both improve their organizational efficiency and competitive ability.In the light of these detected needs and existing policy guidance at the European level, the project has gathered four HEIs from three participating countries and one Quality Assurance agency in higher education in order to prepare a set of intellectual outputs which would support these new developments to both participating and ‘non-participating’ HEIs across Europe. The partners were chosen to represent both ‘advanced’ and ‘learning’ countries which still need to make progress in the development of HRM and / or are committed to enhancing their fairly new practices of HRM. The choice of academic partners from three countries was motivated by their significant role in the international and national higher education systems, as well as strategic policy developments. In choosing the project partners, attention was also paid to cover different perspectives, and therefore included both private and public HEIs, representing in this way a mix of possible methodologies for putting an efficient HRM system in place.The project is designed to firstly map existing HRM policies and practices at HEIs in the EU and then conduct organizational diagnostics across HEIs in partnering countries to collect information from the field regarding the specificities of HRM function in higher education. Both of these groups of findings will feed into development of National guidelines for developing HRM in HEIs (both, Universities and Universities of Applied Sciences) in all three participating countries. Furthermore, these outputs will serve as a sound basis for tailoring specific HRM procedures at the individual partner HEIs as a way of implementation of a part of national guidelines. Finally, a benchmarking tool will be constructed and validated in order to serve to all European HEIs wishing to measure the level of development of their own HRM functions and to motivate management to engage in further improvement work.The project is expected to have immediate impact on the project partners and participants and non-participating HEIs as its target group in terms of enhanced awareness of the significance of the HRM function for the quality of HEIs provisions, assisting them at the same time with a set of highly usable tools to initiate changes in their organizational environment. By development of an online self-assessment tool as an open educational resource (OER), the project directly provides European added value, offering an innovative tool for benchmarking to all EU HEIs interested in betterment of their internal HRM practices.