POLYMAT endorsed the European Researchers' Charter and the Code of Conduct for Researcher Recruitment. Specifically, the European Charter for Researchers outlines the functions, responsibilities and rights of investigators and their employers. The aim is to ensure that the relation between these parties contributes to successful performance in the generation, transfer and shared use of knowledge, as well as the professional development of researchers from the early stages. 

Moreover, the Code of Conduct for the recruitment of researchers was drawn up to improve enrolment, so that selection procedures are fair and transparent. The researcher's merit should be measured not only by the number of publications, but also by a wider range of evaluation criteria such as education and teaching, supervision, teamwork, knowledge transfer, management and public awareness-raising activities.

To help accommodate the research institutions to the Charter and Code principles, the Commission set out a procedure through which those institutions could design their own Human Resources (HR) Strategy.

This procedure consists of five steps:

1.    Preparation of a rigorous Internal Analysis.
2.    Publication of the Institution Strategy in the corporate website to maintain and improve the Charter and Code. 
3.    Evaluation and approval of the Strategy by the Commission. 
4.    Application and continuous self-assessment of the process by the institution
5.    And finally, have the Strategy and its deployment evaluate externally by the Commission every four years after initiating the process.

The ‘HR Excellence in Research’ award will be activated on the EURAXESS portal: every time the center posts a vacancy on it, the ‘HR Excellence in Research’ icon will appear.

Furthermore, the institution will be listed in the EURAXESS website under the header of 'HR Acknowledged Institutions' (https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/hrs4r) where the HR awarded institutions are regrouped per country.