Glossary
The complete A–Z of recruiting and HR terms, written by SocialTalent.
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Active Candidate
An active candidate is someone currently looking for a new role — applying, responding to adverts, and engaging with recruiters. Active candidates represent a minority of the workforce but generate the majority of applications to any given job.
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Adverse Impact
Adverse impact is the legal concept that a hiring process — even one that's neutral on its face — may be discriminatory if it produces substantially different selection outcomes across protected demographic groups. It's the framework that addresses unintended discrimination.
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Affinity Bias
Affinity bias is the tendency to favour candidates who share traits with the interviewer — same university, same background, same hobbies, same communication style. It feels like recognising quality but is actually recognising similarity.
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Affirmative Action
Affirmative action is the set of policies — historically used in some US contexts — that took proactive steps to address underrepresentation of specific demographic groups in hiring, education, and contracting. Its legal scope has narrowed significantly in recent years through US Supreme Court rulings.
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AI in Recruiting
AI in recruiting is the use of machine learning, large language models, and related technologies to assist or automate parts of the hiring process — sourcing, screening, scheduling, interview support, and decision-making. It's now embedded in most modern TA stacks.
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AI Interviewer
An AI interviewer is a system that conducts candidate conversations autonomously — typically asking predefined questions, capturing responses, and scoring against rubrics. It's one of the most-debated AI applications in hiring because of its direct effect on candidate experience and decision quality.
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AI Sourcing
AI sourcing is the use of AI tools to identify, rank, and engage candidates — generating Boolean strings, suggesting target profiles, scoring candidate-role fit, and drafting personalised outreach. It accelerates the work sourcers do but doesn't replace the judgment that defines it.
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Applicant Tracking System
An applicant tracking system (ATS) is the software category that manages the end-to-end recruiting workflow — capturing applications, tracking candidates through pipeline stages, storing scorecards and offers, and feeding TA analytics. It's the largest single category of TA tooling spend.
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ATS (Applicant Tracking System)
An ATS (Applicant Tracking System) is the software platform that holds candidate records, manages requisitions, runs the application workflow, and tracks candidates through the hiring funnel. It's the operational backbone of modern recruiting.
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Background Check
A background check is the formal verification of a candidate's history before they start — typically covering employment dates, education, criminal record, and identity. It's the final compliance step between offer acceptance and start date.
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Behavioural Interview
A behavioural interview asks candidates to describe specific past situations and how they handled them — on the principle that past behaviour is the strongest predictor of future behaviour in similar contexts.
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Bias in Hiring
Bias in hiring is the systematic distortion of recruiting decisions by factors unrelated to job performance — cognitive shortcuts, similarity preferences, demographic assumptions, and pattern-matching that shapes outcomes without the recruiter or interviewer realising it.
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Blind Hiring
Blind hiring is a recruiting approach that removes identifying information — names, photos, schools, sometimes employers — from candidate materials at early screening stages, with the goal of evaluating candidates on capability rather than demographic or background signals.
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Boolean Search
Boolean search is a technique for finding candidates by combining keywords with logical operators — AND, OR, NOT, parentheses, and quotation marks — to narrow or broaden results across job boards, search engines, and platforms like LinkedIn.
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Boolean String
A Boolean string is a search query that combines keywords with Boolean operators — AND, OR, NOT, parentheses, and quotation marks — to return a precise list of candidates from a database or search engine.
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Calibration
Calibration is the practice of aligning interviewers on what each score level means and what the bar for hire looks like, so different interviewers reach consistent assessments of the same evidence.
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Candidate Communication
Candidate communication is the practice of keeping candidates informed across every stage of the hiring process — confirmations, status updates, scheduling, decision delivery, and follow-up. It's the single largest driver of candidate experience.
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Candidate Dropout
Candidate dropout is when a candidate voluntarily exits the hiring process before a decision — withdrawing, ghosting, or declining to continue. It's distinct from company-side rejection and reveals where the candidate experience is breaking down.
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Candidate Dropout Rate
Candidate dropout rate is the percentage of candidates who exit the hiring process voluntarily — withdrawing, ghosting, or declining to continue — at each stage of the funnel.
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Candidate Experience
Candidate experience is the sum of every interaction a candidate has with a company during the hiring process — from the job ad they first see to the way a rejection is delivered. It shapes both the company's reputation and its ability to hire.
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Candidate Feedback
Candidate feedback works in two directions — feedback the company gives candidates after interviews, and feedback the company collects from candidates about the hiring experience. Both shape candidate experience and employer brand.
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Candidate Journey
The candidate journey is the structured map of every stage a candidate moves through with a company — from awareness through application, interview, decision, and post-decision relationship. It's the design artefact that produces the candidate experience.
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Candidate Matching
Candidate matching is the automated comparison of candidates against role requirements to rank fit — using parsed CV data, role criteria, and AI ranking models to surface relevant candidates from a large pool.
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Candidate NPS
Candidate NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures candidate experience by asking how likely a candidate is to recommend the company's hiring process to a friend or peer, on a 0-10 scale. It produces a single number representing the experience of the people who went through the process.
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Candidate Persona
A candidate persona is a structured profile of the ideal hire for a given role — covering skills, experience, motivations, location, and what they care about — used to guide sourcing, messaging, and assessment.
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Candidate Relationship Management
Candidate relationship management (CRM) is the practice — and the technology category — of building, tracking, and nurturing relationships with candidates over time, even when they aren't in an active application. It's the recruiting equivalent of marketing's customer relationship management.
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Competency-Based Interview
A competency-based interview assesses candidates against a defined set of competencies — the skills, behaviours, and capabilities required for the role — using questions and scoring designed to test each competency directly.
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Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency for interviewers to seek, weight, and remember evidence that confirms their early impression of a candidate, while discounting evidence that contradicts it. It turns the interview into a search for justification rather than assessment.
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Contingent Search
Contingent search is an agency recruiting model where the recruiter is only paid when a candidate is hired, typically as a percentage of the first-year salary. It contrasts with retained search, where fees are paid regardless of outcome.
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Cost per Hire
Cost per hire is the total cost of recruiting divided by the number of hires made in a defined period — capturing both internal costs (recruiter salaries, tooling) and external costs (agencies, advertising, referrals).
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CRM (recruiting)
A CRM (candidate relationship management system) in recruiting is the platform that manages relationships with candidates outside active application processes — talent community members, silver medallists, sourced contacts, and past applicants — to convert long-term relationships into hires.
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Culture Fit Interview
A culture fit interview assesses how a candidate's working style, values, and behaviours align with the company's culture. Done well, it tests culture-add behaviours against role-relevant criteria; done badly, it becomes affinity bias dressed up as judgment.
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Debrief Meeting
A debrief meeting is the structured discussion after a candidate's interview loop where the panel reviews scored evidence and reaches a hiring decision. It's where structured interviewing either pays off or collapses into impression-based decision-making.
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DEI in TA
DEI in TA — diversity, equity, and inclusion in talent acquisition — refers to the set of practices and outcomes that make hiring fairer, more representative, and more accessible. The term covers practices, metrics, and a contested area of organisational strategy.
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Direct Sourcing
Direct sourcing is the practice of building a company's own talent pipeline — sourced, engaged, and managed internally — rather than relying on external agencies to supply candidates.
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Diverse Hiring
Diverse hiring is the practice of building hiring processes that produce workforces representative across demographic and experiential dimensions — gender, ethnicity, age, disability, socioeconomic background, and others. It's the outcome side of inclusive hiring practices.
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EEOC
The EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) is the US federal agency that enforces civil rights laws against workplace discrimination. It investigates complaints, issues guidance, and brings enforcement actions covering hiring, promotion, pay, and termination decisions.
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Employee Referral Program
An employee referral program is a structured scheme that encourages employees to recommend candidates for open roles, typically backed by a bonus paid when a referred candidate is hired and stays a defined period.
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Employer Brand
Employer brand is the perception of a company as a place to work — what current employees believe, what former employees say, what candidates assume, and what the public reads online. It shapes who applies, who accepts, and who stays.
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EVP (Employee Value Proposition)
An EVP — Employee Value Proposition — is the articulated answer to "why work here?" It defines what the company offers employees in return for their work, in language specific enough to differentiate the company from competitors.
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Executive Search
Executive search is the specialist, retained practice of recruiting for senior leadership roles — typically VP, C-suite, and board level. It uses deep market mapping, discreet outreach, and long engagement cycles.
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Fill Rate
Fill rate is the percentage of open requisitions that get successfully filled within a defined period — typically a quarter or year. It's the throughput metric for the entire TA function, summarising how much of the hiring plan was actually delivered.
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First-Year Retention Rate
First-year retention rate is the percentage of new hires who remain employed at the company twelve months after their start date. It's the most reliable single signal of hire quality and a direct indicator of recruiting and onboarding effectiveness.
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Four-Fifths Rule
The four-fifths rule (also called the 80% rule) is a US legal guideline used by the EEOC and federal courts to identify potential adverse impact in hiring. It flags when the selection rate for any protected group falls below 80% of the rate for the highest-selected group.
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Halo Effect
The halo effect is the cognitive bias where a single positive impression of a candidate — articulate opening, prestigious employer, confident demeanour — inflates the assessment of unrelated competencies the interviewer hasn't actually tested.
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Hiring Decision
A hiring decision is the formal yes-or-no verdict on whether to extend an offer to a specific candidate, made after the interview loop and debrief. It's the moment all the recruiting work either produces a hire or doesn't.
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Hiring Manager Intake
A hiring manager intake is the structured kick-off conversation between recruiter and hiring manager at the start of a search — clarifying role requirements, target candidate profile, sourcing strategy, interview process, and success criteria.
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Hiring Manager Kickoff
A hiring manager kickoff is the meeting that initiates a search — bringing the recruiter and hiring manager together to align on the role, agree the brief, and set expectations for how the search will run. It overlaps significantly with the hiring manager intake.
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Hiring Manager Satisfaction
Hiring manager satisfaction is the structured measure of how well TA served the hiring manager during a search — covering brief understanding, candidate quality, process management, and outcome. It captures the internal-customer side of recruiting performance.
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Hiring Process
A hiring process is the end-to-end sequence of activities a company runs to fill a role — from requisition approval through sourcing, screening, interviewing, decision, offer, and start. It's the operational system that produces hires.
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Hiring ROI
Hiring ROI is the return on investment from recruiting activity, calculated as the value generated by hires relative to the cost of producing them. It frames TA as a value-creation function rather than a cost centre.
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Horn Effect
The horn effect is the cognitive bias where a single negative impression of a candidate — a nervous opening, an unfamiliar accent, a weaker-than-expected first answer — depresses the assessment of unrelated competencies the interviewer hasn't actually tested.
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HRIS
An HRIS (Human Resources Information System) is the system of record for employee data — payroll, benefits, time-off, organisational structure, and employment history. It's distinct from an ATS, which handles candidates rather than employees, but the two need to integrate cleanly.
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Inclusive Hiring
Inclusive hiring is the practice of designing recruiting processes that give candidates from all backgrounds an equal opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities — through structured interviewing, broad sourcing, bias mitigation, and accessible process design.
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InMail
InMail is LinkedIn's paid direct messaging product that lets recruiters contact candidates they aren't connected to. Response rates typically range from 10-30% depending on role, message quality, and candidate seniority.
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Intake Meeting
An intake meeting is the structured kickoff conversation between recruiter and hiring manager at the start of a search — clarifying role requirements, target candidates, sourcing strategy, interview process, and decision criteria.
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Interview Bias
Interview bias is the systematic distortion of interview judgment by factors unrelated to job performance — cognitive shortcuts, similarity preferences, first-impression effects, and unconscious associations that shape decisions without the interviewer realising it.
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Interview Debrief
An interview debrief is the structured meeting after a candidate's interview loop where panellists discuss their scored evidence and reach a hiring decision. It's the moment structured interviewing either pays off or falls apart.
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Interview Intake Meeting
An interview intake meeting is the structured kickoff session that aligns recruiter, hiring manager, and interview panel on what the role needs, how candidates will be assessed, and how each interviewer's competencies fit into the loop.
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Interview Intelligence
Interview intelligence is the practice — and the platform category — of recording, transcribing, and analysing interviews to make hiring more consistent, evidence-based, and improvable over time. It turns interviews from one-off conversations into a measurable system.
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Interview Intelligence Platform
An interview intelligence platform is software that records, transcribes, and analyses interviews to support structured hiring — surfacing scorecard prompts in real time, generating post-interview analytics on coverage and consistency, and turning interviews into measurable, improvable processes.
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Interview Kit
An interview kit is the bundle of materials that defines how a specific role is interviewed — competencies to assess, questions to ask, scoring rubrics, interviewer assignments, and the order of the loop. It's the operating manual for hiring a particular role.
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Interview Loop
An interview loop is the full sequence of interviews a candidate goes through for a specific role — typically 3-5 conversations covering different competencies and viewpoints, ending in a debrief and hiring decision.
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Interview Panel
An interview panel is a single interview conducted by multiple interviewers simultaneously, with the candidate responding to questions from each. It compresses interview time but trades depth for breadth.
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Interview Scorecard
An interview scorecard is the structured form interviewers complete after each interview, capturing scores for each competency assessed, evidence supporting those scores, and a recommendation. It's the artefact that turns an interview into an evidence-based hiring input.
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Interview-to-Offer Ratio
Interview-to-offer ratio is the number of candidates interviewed per offer extended. It's a direct measure of interview-stage selectivity and one of the cleanest indicators of whether sourcing and screening are sending qualified candidates into the loop.
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Interviewer Training
Interviewer training is the structured education that teaches interviewers how to ask, probe, score, and debrief — turning hiring managers and panellists from natural conversationalists into evidence-gathering assessors.
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Job Brief
A job brief is the recruiter-facing summary of a role — what the role is, who it targets, where credible candidates work, what competencies matter, and what the offer parameters are. It's the operational document that drives sourcing and screening.
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Job Specification
A job specification — often called a job description or JD — is the candidate-facing document describing a role. It covers responsibilities, required qualifications, preferred qualifications, and what the company offers. It's the public face of the role.
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Offer Acceptance Rate
Offer acceptance rate is the percentage of formal offers that candidates accept. It's the cleanest single metric for whether a company can close the candidates it wants and one of the most diagnostic numbers in TA reporting.
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Offer Extension
Offer extension is the process of formally extending a job offer to the selected candidate — communicating the role, compensation package, and terms in a way that maximises acceptance. It's the conversion moment of the entire hiring funnel.
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Offer Negotiation
Offer negotiation is the back-and-forth conversation about offer terms between recruiter and candidate — covering compensation, equity, signing bonus, start date, and other conditions. It's where most offers are won or lost.
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Offer-to-Hire Ratio
Offer-to-hire ratio is the number of offers extended per successful hire — effectively the inverse of offer acceptance rate, expressed as the workload required to produce a single hire at the offer stage.
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Onboarding
Onboarding is the structured process of integrating a new hire into the company during their first weeks and months — covering paperwork, system access, training, manager relationship, team introduction, and ramp to productivity. It's the bridge between candidate experience and employee experience.
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Outreach Sequence
An outreach sequence is a scheduled series of messages — usually email or InMail — sent to a sourced candidate to open a conversation. Sequences typically run three to five touches across 10-21 days.
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Pass-Through Rate
Pass-through rate is the percentage of candidates who advance from one stage of the hiring funnel to the next. It's the building-block metric of all funnel analysis — every conversion calculation in TA is a pass-through rate by another name.
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Passive Candidate
A passive candidate is a working professional who is not actively looking for a new job but would consider the right opportunity. Passive candidates make up the majority of the workforce and are the primary target of most sourcing work.
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Pay Equity
Pay equity is the principle and practice that employees doing the same or substantially similar work should receive comparable compensation regardless of demographic characteristics like gender, race, or ethnicity. It's both a legal requirement in many jurisdictions and a strategic compensation discipline.
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Pipeline Stage
A pipeline stage is one defined step of the hiring funnel that candidates move through — sourced, applied, screened, interviewed, offered, hired. Each stage has entry criteria, exit criteria, and an owner who moves candidates through it.
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Pipeline Velocity
Pipeline velocity is the rate at which candidates move through the hiring funnel — how quickly they progress from sourced or applied through to offer. It captures throughput, not just stage-by-stage conversion.
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Programmatic Job Advertising
Programmatic job advertising is the automated buying and placement of job ads across job boards and aggregators — using bidding algorithms to optimise ad spend against application volume, candidate quality, and cost-per-application targets.
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Recruiter Capacity
Recruiter capacity is the maximum number of active requisitions a recruiter can effectively manage at one time without quality degrading. It's the planning metric that determines whether the TA team can absorb the company's hiring plan.
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Recruitment Automation
Recruitment automation is the use of software to handle repetitive recruiting tasks without manual intervention — application acknowledgement, scheduling, reminder sequences, status updates, sourcing outreach, and routine reporting. It frees recruiter time for the work that requires judgment.
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Recruitment Lifecycle
The recruitment lifecycle is the full end-to-end view of recruiting activity — from workforce planning through requisition, sourcing, hiring, onboarding, and post-hire integration. It's the strategic frame that puts individual hires inside a longer arc.
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Recruitment Marketing Platform
A recruitment marketing platform is software that manages the marketing-side of TA — careers site content, employer brand campaigns, talent community engagement, programmatic job advertising, and conversion tracking from awareness through application.
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Reference Check
A reference check is a structured conversation with someone who has worked with the candidate — usually a former manager or colleague — to validate interview impressions, surface concerns, and add evidence to the hiring decision.
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Referral Sourcing
Referral sourcing is the practice of identifying and approaching candidates through employee recommendations — either passively via referral programs or actively by asking employees to name specific people in their networks.
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Rejection Experience
Rejection experience is the quality of how a company communicates "no" to candidates — the timing, tone, specificity, and follow-up of declined-candidate communication. It's the most under-invested touchpoint in candidate experience and one of the largest hidden drivers of employer brand.
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Req Load
Req load is the number of active requisitions currently assigned to a recruiter or recruiting team — the actual workload measure compared against capacity to identify under- or over-loading.
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Req Management
Req management is the operational discipline of tracking, prioritising, and progressing the active requisition portfolio — keeping reqs moving, surfacing aging searches, and aligning recruiter capacity with business demand.
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Requisition
A requisition (often shortened to "req") is the formal authorisation to hire for a specific role — typically capturing role, level, location, budget, hiring manager, and target start date. It's the document that turns business need into approved recruiting activity.
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Resume Parsing
Resume parsing is the automated extraction of structured data from CV files — name, contact details, employment history, education, skills, certifications — into the structured fields an ATS or CRM needs to manage candidates at scale.
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Screening
Screening is the first quality filter in the hiring process — the structured assessment that decides whether a candidate advances to the hiring manager interview. It's where weak fit gets surfaced quickly and strong fit gets validated.
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Screening Call
A screening call is the first formal conversation between a candidate and a recruiter, typically 20-30 minutes by phone or video, used to confirm interest, validate baseline qualifications, and assess fit before passing the candidate to the hiring manager.
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Shortlisting
Shortlisting is the act of selecting the most qualified candidates from a larger pool to advance to interview. It's the recruiter's curatorial decision — distilling a long list of applicants or sourced candidates into a focused shortlist for the hiring manager.
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Silver Medallist
A silver medallist is a candidate who reached the final stages of a hiring process but wasn't selected — typically the second-place candidate behind the eventual hire. Silver medallists are the highest-converting talent pool most companies fail to engage.
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Situational Interview
A situational interview asks candidates how they would handle hypothetical scenarios relevant to the role. It tests judgment and approach rather than evidence of past behaviour.
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Source of Hire
Source of hire is the metric that tracks where successful hires came from — referral, LinkedIn outbound, job board, agency, careers site, talent pool. It's the foundation of channel-mix decisions and recruiting budget allocation.
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Sourcing
Sourcing is the proactive identification, engagement, and pipelining of potential candidates — usually passive ones — before a formal application. It sits at the top of the recruiting funnel and produces the shortlists recruiters work from.
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Sourcing Channel
A sourcing channel is any source from which candidates are identified or attracted — job boards, referrals, LinkedIn, events, agencies, direct approach, or the company's own talent pool. Channel mix drives cost, speed, and quality.
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Sourcing Funnel
The sourcing funnel is the sequence of stages a candidate moves through during the sourcing phase — sourced, contacted, responded, screened, handed to recruiter — and the conversion rates between them.
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Sourcing Funnel Conversion
Sourcing funnel conversion is the rate at which sourced candidates progress through each stage of the top-of-funnel — sourced to contacted, contacted to responded, responded to qualified, qualified to handed off — expressed as percentages.
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STAR Method
The STAR method is a framework for answering and probing behavioural interview questions, structured around four elements: Situation, Task, Action, and Result. It produces concrete, evidence-rich answers rather than abstract claims.
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Structured Assessment
Structured assessment is the practice of evaluating candidates against the same predefined criteria, using the same questions or exercises, scored against the same rubric. It's the inclusive-hiring counterpart to unstructured assessment based on impression and interview chemistry.
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Structured Interview
A structured interview is a hiring conversation where every candidate is asked the same predefined questions, in the same order, and scored against the same rubric. It's the single most validated predictor of job performance in the academic literature.
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Talent Acquisition Software
Talent acquisition software is the broad category of platforms TA functions use across the hiring lifecycle — including ATS, CRM, sourcing tools, interview intelligence, assessment platforms, recruitment marketing, and analytics. It covers the full TA tech stack rather than any single product.
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Talent Community
A talent community is an opt-in audience of candidates who have signed up to receive content, role notifications, and ongoing engagement from a company — even when they aren't actively applying. It's the front-of-funnel relationship layer for proactive recruiting.
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Talent CRM
A talent CRM is the software platform category that manages relationships with candidates outside active application processes — the recruiting equivalent of a sales CRM. Leading platforms include Beamery, Avature, Phenom, Gem, and Eightfold.
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Talent Intelligence
Talent intelligence is the practice of using data and analysis — labour market, compensation, talent flow, competitor hiring — to inform TA decisions. It converts raw recruiting and market data into strategic guidance for hiring and workforce planning.
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Talent Mapping
Talent mapping is the process of identifying, cataloguing, and tracking candidates in a target market — typically for specific roles, companies, or skill areas — to build a long-term picture of where relevant talent exists.
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Talent Pool
A talent pool is a curated group of candidates — active or passive, internal or external — who have been identified as potentially relevant for current or future roles. It's the long-term inventory a recruiting function builds to reduce time to fill.
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Technical Interview
A technical interview assesses a candidate's hands-on capability in the technical domain of the role — coding for engineers, modelling for data scientists, design problems for designers — through demonstration rather than discussion.
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Time to Fill
Time to fill is the number of calendar days between a requisition opening and the successful candidate accepting the offer. It measures the recruiting process from authorisation to commitment — not from candidate application.
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Time to Hire
Time to hire is the number of days between a candidate's first contact with the company and their acceptance of the offer. It measures the candidate-side journey through the hiring process, not the full requisition lifecycle.
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Unconscious Bias
Unconscious bias is the set of automatic mental shortcuts and associations that influence judgment outside conscious awareness. In hiring, it shapes who gets called back, who gets through screening, and who gets hired — often without the decision-maker realising it.
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Unstructured Interview
An unstructured interview is a hiring conversation that follows no predefined question set or scoring rubric. The interviewer asks whatever feels relevant, and the assessment relies on overall impression rather than evidence against fixed criteria.