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Glossary Articles
Plain-English hiring, recruiting, onboarding, and talent acquisition definitions for modern hiring teams.
What Are Knockout Questions?
Knockout questions help filter candidates against true must-have requirements, but they should be used carefully because they directly shape who enters the hiring process.
What Is a Hiring Funnel?
The hiring funnel shows where candidates enter, progress, pause, drop off, and convert throughout the recruitment process.
What Is a Job Requisition?
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?
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?
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?
Adverse impact in hiring explains when a selection process may disadvantage a protected group, why it matters for AI screening, and how teams can monitor fairness without slowing hiring.
What Is Algorithmic Bias in Hiring?
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?
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?
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?
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?
Application conversion rate measures how effectively a job ad, career page, or application flow turns candidate interest into completed applications.
What Is Candidate Assessment?
Candidate assessment covers skills tests, work samples, structured interviews, and other evidence-gathering methods used to compare candidates fairly.
What Is Candidate Matching?
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?
Candidate nurturing keeps qualified candidates warm through useful communication, role updates, follow-up, and relationship management before and during hiring.
What Is Candidate Screening?
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?
Conversational AI in recruiting supports candidate questions, screening, scheduling, and follow-up through natural language interactions.
What Is Cost per Hire?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
Pipeline velocity helps teams see whether candidates are progressing quickly enough through screening, interviews, offers, and hiring decisions.
What Is Programmatic Job Advertising?
Programmatic job advertising uses automation to distribute and optimise job ad spend across job boards, aggregators, and candidate acquisition channels.
What Is Recruiter Capacity?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
AI recruiting tools help hiring teams automate, analyze, and improve parts of the hiring process, from job descriptions and sourcing to screening, interview notes, candidate communication, and reporting.
What Are Predictive Analytics in Recruitment?
Predictive analytics in recruitment use historical hiring data, current pipeline signals, and statistical models to forecast hiring outcomes and help teams make better talent decisions.
What Are Recruiting Dashboards?
Recruiting dashboards give hiring teams a shared, visual view of open roles, candidate pipeline health, hiring speed, source performance, and bottlenecks so they can make better recruiting decisions.
What Are Recruitment KPIs?
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?
Talent pools are organized groups of potential candidates a hiring team can engage before a role opens. Learn how they work, who belongs in them, and how to manage them well.
What Is a Hiring Manager?
A hiring manager is the person responsible for defining an open role, evaluating finalists, and choosing the candidate who should join their team. Learn what hiring managers do and how they work with recruiters.
What Is a New Hire Checklist?
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?
A new hire orientation is a structured first-day or first-week introduction that helps employees understand the company, complete key setup tasks, meet important people, and begin their role with confidence.
What Is a Recruiter?
A recruiter is the hiring professional who helps an organization find, engage, assess, and move candidates through the hiring process. Learn what recruiters do, how they work with hiring managers, and how to improve recruiter workflows.
What Is a Recruiting Process?
A recruiting process is the structured sequence hiring teams use to define a role, attract candidates, evaluate them consistently, make an offer, and improve hiring over time.
What Is a Structured Interview?
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?
A talent pipeline is a planned group of qualified people a hiring team can engage for current or future roles. Learn how pipelines work, how to build them, and how to keep them useful.
What Is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?
An applicant tracking system is recruiting software that helps hiring teams collect applications, manage candidate pipelines, coordinate interviews, document feedback, and improve hiring workflows.
What Is an Employee Value Proposition (EVP)?
An employee value proposition (EVP) explains what employees and candidates can expect from working at your company, from pay and benefits to culture, growth, purpose, and ways of working.
What Is an Interview Scorecard?
An interview scorecard is a structured hiring rubric that helps interviewers evaluate candidates against role-specific criteria, capture evidence, and compare feedback consistently.
What Is an Onboarding Process?
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?
Artificial intelligence in recruitment uses software to help hiring teams write, source, screen, schedule, interview, and summarize candidate information while keeping people responsible for hiring decisions.
What Is Attrition Rate?
Attrition rate measures the percentage of employees who leave an organization during a defined period, helping hiring and HR teams understand retention, workforce stability, and capacity risk.
What Is Candidate Experience?
Candidate experience is how job seekers perceive your hiring process, from first impression to application, interviews, offer, rejection, and onboarding. Learn why it matters and how hiring teams can improve it.
What Is Candidate Relationship Management?
Candidate relationship management helps hiring teams build, organize, and nurture talent relationships before a role opens, so future hiring starts with warm, relevant candidates instead of a blank slate.
What Is Company Culture?
Company culture is the shared values, norms, behaviors, and everyday practices that shape how people work together. Learn what it means for hiring teams and how to assess it responsibly.
What Is Diversity in the Workplace?
Diversity in the workplace means having people with different backgrounds, identities, experiences, and perspectives represented and supported across the organization.
What Is Employee Onboarding?
Employee onboarding is the structured process of welcoming a new hire, setting up their tools and paperwork, clarifying their role, and helping them become productive and connected.
What Is Employee Retention?
Employee retention is an organization's ability to keep employees over time, reducing avoidable turnover and protecting workforce stability, knowledge, and hiring capacity.
What Is Employee Turnover Rate?
Employee turnover rate measures the percentage of employees who leave an organization during a defined period, helping HR and hiring teams understand replacement demand, retention risk, and workforce stability.
What Is Employer Branding?
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?
Inclusive hiring is a fair, structured approach to recruiting and selecting candidates so more qualified people can access the process and be evaluated on job-relevant evidence.
What Is Internal Recruiting?
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?
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?
People operations is the strategic, employee-centered function that helps companies hire, support, develop, engage, and retain people while keeping work organized, compliant, and measurable.
What Is Quality of Hire?
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?
A recruiting strategy is a deliberate plan for attracting, evaluating, and hiring people in a way that supports business goals, candidate experience, and long-term team performance.
What Is Recruiting Technology?
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?
Recruitment automation uses software, workflows, and AI-assisted tools to reduce repetitive hiring admin while keeping recruiters and hiring managers in control of decisions.
What Is Recruitment Marketing?
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?
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?
Skills-based hiring is a recruiting approach that evaluates candidates on job-relevant capabilities, evidence, and potential rather than relying mainly on degrees, titles, or pedigree.
What Is Social Media Recruiting?
Social media recruiting is the use of social platforms to attract, engage, source, and convert candidates through employer brand content, job promotion, employee advocacy, and direct outreach.
What Is Sourcing Strategy in Recruitment?
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?
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 Talent Retention Strategy?
A talent retention strategy is a structured plan for keeping high-value employees engaged, growing, and likely to stay, reducing avoidable turnover in critical roles.
What Is Time-to-Fill?
Time-to-fill is a recruiting metric that measures how many calendar days it takes to fill an open role, usually from requisition approval or job posting to accepted offer.
What Is Time-to-Hire?
Time-to-hire measures how many days it takes a known candidate to move from entering your hiring pipeline to accepting an offer.