Glossary Articles
Plain-English hiring, recruiting, onboarding, and talent acquisition definitions for modern hiring teams.
What Are Knockout Questions?
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Knockout questions check essential role requirements. Learn when to use them, how to review exceptions and which screening outcomes to measure.
What Is a Hiring Funnel?
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The hiring funnel shows where candidates enter, progress, pause, drop off, and convert throughout the recruitment process.
What Is a Job Requisition?
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A job requisition is the internal hiring approval that defines why a role exists, who owns it, what budget is approved, and when recruiting can begin.
What Is a Passive Candidate?
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Passive candidates are not actively job hunting, so recruiting them requires targeted outreach, role relevance, trust, and a longer relationship-building motion.
What Is a Pre-Employment Assessment?
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Pre-employment assessments help teams evaluate role-related evidence before hiring, but they need clear criteria, reasonable effort, and fairness review.
What Is Adverse Impact in Hiring?
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Adverse impact concerns selection outcomes that disadvantage a protected group. Learn the concept, measurement limits and review considerations.
What Is Algorithmic Bias in Hiring?
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Algorithmic bias in hiring is the risk that automated screening, ranking, matching, or interview tools disadvantage candidates for reasons unrelated to role performance.
What Is an Employee Referral Program?
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Employee referral programs turn trusted employee networks into a hiring source, but they need structure, fairness checks, and transparent follow-up.
What Is an Evergreen Requisition?
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Evergreen requisitions help teams build pipelines for recurring roles, but they need clear ownership, candidate communication, and stage hygiene.
What Is Applicant Drop-Off Rate?
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Applicant drop-off rate shows where candidates abandon an application, screening step, interview booking flow, or hiring process before completion.
What Is Application Conversion Rate?
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Application conversion rate measures how effectively a job ad, career page, or application flow turns candidate interest into completed applications.
What Is Candidate Assessment?
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Candidate assessment covers skills tests, work samples, structured interviews, and other evidence-gathering methods used to compare candidates fairly.
What Is Candidate Matching?
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Candidate matching helps recruiters compare candidate evidence with job requirements, often using AI to understand skills and context beyond exact keywords.
What Is Candidate Nurturing?
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Candidate nurturing keeps qualified candidates warm through useful communication, role updates, follow-up, and relationship management before and during hiring.
What Is Candidate Screening?
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Candidate screening helps recruiters move from applicant volume to a qualified shortlist using role-related criteria, structured evidence, and human review.
What Is Conversational AI in Recruiting?
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Conversational AI in recruiting supports candidate questions, screening, scheduling, and follow-up through natural language interactions.
What Is Cost per Hire?
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Cost per hire helps hiring teams understand the financial efficiency of recruiting by connecting spend, recruiter effort, channels, tools, and total hires.
What Is CV Parsing?
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CV parsing turns resumes into structured data so recruiters and ATS workflows can search, filter, compare, and route candidate information more consistently.
What Is Explainable AI in Hiring?
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Explainable AI in hiring helps recruiters understand why a tool ranked, recommended, summarized, or flagged a candidate before acting on the output.
What Is Interview Scheduling?
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Interview scheduling is the operational step that turns a qualified candidate into a confirmed interview without unnecessary delay or friction.
What Is Interview-to-Hire Ratio?
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Interview-to-hire ratio shows how many interviews a team needs to make one successful hire and whether screening is sending the right candidates forward.
What Is Market Mapping?
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Market mapping helps recruiters understand where talent exists, what skills are available, and how realistic a hiring plan is before sourcing begins.
What Is Offer Acceptance Rate?
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Offer acceptance rate shows whether candidates are saying yes to your offers and can reveal issues with compensation, speed, role clarity, and candidate experience.
What Is Pipeline Velocity?
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Pipeline velocity helps teams see whether candidates are progressing quickly enough through screening, interviews, offers, and hiring decisions.
What Is Programmatic Job Advertising?
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Programmatic job advertising uses automation to distribute and optimise job ad spend across job boards, aggregators, and candidate acquisition channels.
What Is Recruiter Capacity?
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Recruiter capacity helps teams decide how many requisitions, candidates, interviews, and hiring manager relationships one recruiter can support well.
What Is Semantic Search in Recruitment?
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Semantic search helps recruiters find relevant candidates even when resumes and job descriptions use different words for the same skills or experience.
What Is Source of Hire?
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Source of hire helps teams understand which channels produce hires, not just applicants, so recruiting budget and effort can move toward better-performing sources.
What Is Talent Intelligence?
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Talent intelligence combines skills data, labour market insight, candidate pipelines, and hiring outcomes so teams can plan and recruit with better evidence.
What Is Time in Stage?
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Time in stage shows exactly where candidates wait, which owner has the delay, and which hiring step is slowing the overall funnel.
What are AI recruiting tools?
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AI recruiting tools support tasks such as sourcing, screening, interview notes and candidate communication. Learn their uses, limits and review needs.
What Are Predictive Analytics in Recruitment?
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Predictive analytics use hiring data and statistical models to estimate outcomes. Learn recruiting use cases, data requirements and limitations.
What Are Recruiting Dashboards?
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Recruiting dashboards show open roles, candidate stages, hiring speed and source performance. Learn how to use them to identify bottlenecks.
What Are Recruitment KPIs?
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Recruitment KPIs are the key hiring metrics a team tracks to understand whether its recruiting process is fast, fair, cost-effective, and producing strong hires.
What Are Talent Pools?
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Talent pools group potential candidates for future roles. Learn who belongs in them and how to keep candidate information relevant and current.
What Is a Hiring Manager?
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A hiring manager defines a role, evaluates candidates and owns the team’s hiring decision. Learn how managers and recruiters share the work.
What Is a New Hire Checklist?
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A new hire checklist is a structured list of onboarding tasks, owners, and deadlines that helps hiring teams move a new employee from accepted offer to a confident start.
What Is a New Hire Orientation?
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New hire orientation introduces employees to the company, people and essential setup tasks. Learn what to cover during the first days.
What Is a Recruiter?
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A recruiter finds, engages and assesses candidates and coordinates the hiring process. Learn the role and how recruiters work with hiring managers.
What Is a Recruiting Process?
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A recruiting process covers role definition, candidate attraction, assessment and offers. Learn how to design clear stages and handoffs.
What Is a Structured Interview?
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A structured interview is a consistent, job-related interview process where every candidate is assessed against the same criteria, questions, and scoring rubric.
What Is a Talent Pipeline? Stages, Examples and Metrics
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A talent pipeline connects candidates to future hiring needs. Learn useful stages, readiness measures and how to keep the pipeline current.
What Is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?
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An applicant tracking system manages applications, candidate stages, interviews and feedback. Learn what an ATS does and how teams use it.
What Is an Employee Value Proposition (EVP)?
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An employee value proposition explains the pay, benefits, culture, growth and working experience a company offers. Learn how to make it concrete.
What Is an Interview Scorecard?
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An interview scorecard defines role criteria and scoring guidance. Learn how to capture evidence and compare feedback consistently.
What Is an Onboarding Process?
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An onboarding process is the structured way a company welcomes a new hire, prepares them for the role, and helps them become productive, connected, and confident.
What Is Artificial Intelligence in Recruitment?
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AI in recruitment supports tasks such as sourcing, screening, scheduling and summaries. Learn where it helps and why human review matters.
What Is Attrition Rate? Formula, Examples and Benchmarks
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Attrition rate measures departures relative to average headcount. Learn the formula, its limits and how to interpret workforce data.
What Is Candidate Experience?
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Candidate experience is how people perceive your hiring process. Learn how applications, interviews, updates and decisions shape that experience.
What Is Candidate Relationship Management?
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Candidate relationship management organises and nurtures talent relationships. Learn how to keep future hiring conversations relevant.
What Is Company Culture?
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Company culture is how shared values, norms and everyday behaviours shape work. Learn what hiring teams can observe and assess responsibly.
What Is Diversity in the Workplace?
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Diversity in the workplace means having people with different backgrounds, identities, experiences, and perspectives represented and supported across the organization.
What Is Employee Onboarding?
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Employee onboarding helps new hires understand their role, access tools and join the team. Learn the steps beyond first-day paperwork.
What Is Employee Retention?
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Employee retention describes how well a company keeps employees over time. Learn how to measure it and investigate avoidable departures.
What Is Employee Turnover Rate?
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Employee turnover rate measures departures during a defined period. Learn the formula and how to interpret replacement demand and retention risks.
What Is Employer Branding?
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Employer branding is the deliberate work of shaping how candidates, employees, and alumni perceive your company as a place to work.
What Is Inclusive Hiring?
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Inclusive hiring improves access to recruitment and uses job-related evidence to assess candidates. Learn practical steps and review points.
What Is Internal Recruiting?
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Internal recruiting is the practice of filling open roles by sourcing, evaluating, and moving current employees into new opportunities inside the same organization.
What Is People Management?
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People management is the practice of hiring, supporting, developing, aligning, and retaining employees so teams can perform well and people can grow.
What Is People Operations?
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People operations organises how a company supports, develops and retains employees. Learn its responsibilities and relationship to HR.
What Is Quality of Hire?
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Quality of hire measures whether new employees perform well, ramp effectively, stay long enough to create value, and meet the expectations set during hiring.
What Is Recruiting Strategy?
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A recruiting strategy defines how a company attracts, evaluates and hires people. Learn how to align the process with roles and business needs.
What Is Recruiting Technology?
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Recruiting technology is the software and workflow infrastructure hiring teams use to attract, screen, assess, communicate with, and hire candidates more consistently.
What Is Recruitment Automation?
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Recruitment automation reduces repetitive hiring tasks through software and workflows. Learn where it helps and where people need to review.
What Is Recruitment Marketing?
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Recruitment marketing is the use of marketing strategy, employer brand messaging, and candidate-focused content to attract, engage, and convert people into applicants.
What Is Recruitment?
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Recruitment is the process of defining a hiring need, attracting candidates, evaluating them against job-related criteria, and closing the right hire for an open role.
What Is Skills-Based Hiring?
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Skills-based hiring evaluates job-related capabilities and evidence. Learn how to apply it beyond changes to degree and experience requirements.
What Is Social Media Recruiting?
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Social media recruiting uses social platforms to attract and engage candidates. Learn how content, job promotion and outreach support hiring.
What Is Sourcing Strategy in Recruitment?
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A sourcing strategy in recruitment is a planned approach to finding, engaging, and nurturing qualified candidates before and during the hiring process.
What Is Talent Acquisition?
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Talent acquisition is the long-term hiring discipline that helps organizations find, attract, assess, and hire the people they need now and in the future.
What Is a Talent Retention Strategy? Steps and Metrics
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A talent retention strategy addresses avoidable departures through management, work and growth. Learn practical steps and retention measures.
What Is Time-to-Fill?
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Time-to-fill measures the days needed to fill a role. Learn how to define the start and end points, calculate the metric and diagnose delays.
What Is Time-to-Hire?
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Time-to-hire measures how many days it takes a known candidate to move from entering your hiring pipeline to accepting an offer.