General HR Terminology
401(k) Plan: A 401(k) account is an employer-sponsored retirement savings plan that allows employees to put pre-tax paycheck deductions towards their retirement. Some companies choose to match employee contributions up to a specific limit.
Absenteeism: Absenteeism is when an employee chronically misses work without a valid excuse.
Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA): The Americans With Disabilities Act prohibits workplace discrimination against individuals with disabilities.
Bereavement Leave: Bereavement leave is time off an employee takes following a close family member’s death to mourn and plan or attend a funeral. Check out our bereavement leave policy template for an example policy framework to help get you started.
Career Path: A career path is a sequence of jobs that an employee holds to grow and progress in their career.
Career Lattice: A career lattice is a career progression pathway that allows for vertical, horizontal, and diagonal movement within an organization.
Career Ladder: A career ladder is a linear progression of roles an employee can hold throughout their career, typically starting at entry-level and ending at the level of C-suite executive.
Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA): The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act allows employees and their dependents to keep their health insurance coverage for a limited time after their employment ends.
Core Values: A company’s core values are the beliefs that support and guide a company’s overarching vision and company culture.
Compliance: HR compliance is the process of ensuring your organization and employed individuals follow and meet all applicable city, state, and federal regulations and standards.
Department of Labor (DOL): The Department of Labor is a federal agency that enforces federal labor standards and occupational safety. Its mission is to “foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights.”
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC): The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is a federal agency that enforces workplace discrimination laws.
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA): The Fair Labor Standards Act establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and child labor standards for private-sector workers, as well as federal, state, and local government employees.
Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA): A flexible spending account is a pre-tax benefit that allows employees to put aside pre-tax money (up to $2,750 in 2021) to be used for eligible medical expenses. FSA funds are “use it or lose it,” as they cannot be rolled over at the end of the calendar year.
Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA): The Family Medical Leave Act, or FMLA, provides eligible employees 12-weeks of annual unpaid, job-protected leave with benefits to take care of a new child, family member, or personal health condition.
Employee Compensation: Employee compensation is the wages an employer pays to its employees in exchange for their services. This includes their salary, benefits, and other cash incentives.
Employment-at-Will: An at-will agreement allows both the employer or employee to terminate their working relationship at any time for any (legal) reason.
Employee Engagement: Employee engagement measures an individual’s commitment and passion for their job and organization. It also affects their drive to meet and exceed performance expectations and help the company achieve its goals.
Employee Recognition: Employee recognition is the practice of publicly acknowledging and sometimes rewarding employees for their performance, contributions, and loyalty.
Employee Turnover: Employee turnover is the number of employees who leave your organization over a specific period. There are two forms of turnover: voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary turnover is when an employee decides to leave the company for another job or for personal reasons, while involuntary turnover is when an employee is dismissed or laid off.
Exempt Employee: Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), an exempt employee is not eligible to receive overtime pay.
Exit Interview: An exit interview is a formal conversation between an HR representative and a departing employee to collect honest feedback on why the employee is leaving and how your company can improve others’ experience.
Health Savings Accounts (HSA): A health savings account allows individuals with high-deductible health insurance plans to save pre-tax money for eligible medical expenses. HSA accounts do not expire at the end of the year and employees can keep their accounts even if they change employers.
Human Resource Information System (HRIS): A human resources information system is software that stores and streamlines the entry, tracking, management of HR, people, payroll, and benefits data.
Independent Contractor: An independent contractor is hired by a business to perform a specific task or service outlined in a contract. The employer does not withhold taxes from their wages, and employment and labor laws do not apply to independent contractors.
Mission Statement: A company’s mission statement sums up what your company does. For example, Lattice’s mission is to make work meaningful.
Nonexempt Employee: Nonexempt employees are entitled to be eligible for overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA): The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is a part of the Department of Labor (DOL) that was created as part of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. Today, the organization’s mission is to ensure employers provide safe and healthful working conditions for their employees by setting and enforcing standards and offering training, outreach, education, and assistance programs.
Open Enrollment: Open enrollment is the one time a year employees can enroll in health insurance, switch plans, or waive coverage. Once this period has passed, employees will not be able to update their benefits selections unless they experience a qualifying life event (QLE).
Organizational Chart: An organizational chart, or “org chart,” is a diagram detailing the internal structure of a business, the relationship between roles, and the hierarchy of every position.
Overtime Pay: Employees are entitled to overtime pay, or one-and-a-half times an employee’s hourly rate, for any hours they work beyond the standard 40-hour workweek.
Paid Time Off (PTO): A paid time off policy is a set number or accrued number of days an employee can take off for personal time, sick leave, federal holidays, or parental leave. Check out our time-off policy template for an example policy framework.
People strategy: The set of practices that determine how you attract, retain, and grow your employees in order to best accomplish your company’s mission.
Professional Employer Organization (PEO): A professional employer organization, or PEO, helps small and mid-sized companies with their HR, payroll, benefits, and compliance needs. A PEO actually enters into a joint-employment relationship with a company so it can pool employees for different organizations together and get more competitive rates for benefits packages.
Qualifying Life Event (QLE): A qualifying life event, or QLE, is one of the few times you can re-enroll in benefits outside of open enrollment. Life changes like a death in the family, the birth of a child, moving, or turning 26 and getting dropped from a parent’s policy are all examples of a QLE.
Retention: Retention is the practice of keeping employees satisfied in their current roles and committed to your organization.
Stay Interview: Stay interviews ask current employees why they have remained with your company so far and ask what factors might make them consider leaving.
Succession Planning: Succession planning is the practice of identifying and developing the skills of promising internal talent to prepare them to assume a leadership role following a senior leader’s departure or retirement.
Title VII: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
Telecommuting: Telecommuting is when an employee doesn’t work from your company’s office, but instead does their work from home, a coffee shop, or a co-working space.
Total Rewards: Total rewards represent a broader, more holistic view of employee compensation by adding the value of employer-sponsored benefits, policies, and programs to an employee’s salary.
Wellness Program: A wellness program is an employer-sponsored initiative or benefit that aims to improve an employee’s quality of life by encouraging them to prioritize their physical, mental, and financial health.
Workers’ Compensation: Workers’ compensation covers benefits, lost wages, and medical expenses for employees who suffer a work-related injury, illness, disability, or death.
Wrongful Termination: Wrongful termination is when an employer illegally fires an employee by violating their employment agreement or a federal or state law. If a former employee wins a wrongful termination lawsuit, they may be entitled to receive back pay, damages, attorney fees, as well as their old job back.
Vision Statement: A company’s vision statement is what your business aspires to do for your customers or for the world.
Voluntary Benefits: Voluntary benefits are benefits, like disability, life, critical illness, and accident insurance, that employees can opt-in to if they choose. While the employer covers administration fees, the benefits are funded by employee paycheck deductions.
Performance Management Terms
Coaching: Coaching is the act of investing in someone to push them to do their best, make them more aware and intentional with their actions, and achieve their goals.
Employee Development Plan: An employee development plan is a formal process that gives employees clear direction on how to improve their skills and advance their careers.
Employee Performance Improvement Plan (PIP): An employee performance plan, or PIP, is a formal document outlining an employee’s behavioral or performance issues and the steps they should take to improve their performance.
Feedback: Feedback is when an individual shares their opinion or thoughts on an individual or team’s performance with the intention to help them improve.
Key Results Area (KRA): Key results areas, or KRAs, define the areas of focus an employee will work towards and the specific tasks they will accomplish during the year.
Manager Performance Review: A manager review, sometimes called an upward review, is when an employee evaluates their direct supervisor’s performance.
Merit Increase: A merit increase is a salary increase given to employees based on exceptional performance.
Peer-to-Peer Review: A peer to peer review, or “peer review,” is when an individual’s colleague evaluates their performance, skills, and areas of improvement.
Performance Management System: Performance management systems help track and streamline goal setting, performance reviews, and the performance improvement process.
Performance Review: A performance review is a formal face-to-face meeting between a manager and their employee in which they review performance, strengths, areas of improvement, and career goals. Performance reviews can be held annually, biannually, or quarterly, depending on the organization.
Self-Review: A self-review is when an employee evaluates their own performance, strengths, weaknesses, and career interests.
Goals
SMART Goals: SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This goal-setting framework helps people create clear and achievable personal and professional goals.
OKRs: OKRs, or “objectives and key results,” is a goal-setting framework that focuses on defining and tracking individual, team, or organizational objectives and their outcomes. Each OKR consists of one objective and 3-5 key results, or specific ways to track and evaluate the success of the objective.
Cascading Goals: Adopting cascading goals at your organization means ensuring your overall business goals flow (or cascade) down through all levels of the organization to the individual level. This ensures every employee understands how their work contributes to the business’ strategy and success.
GROW Coaching Model: The GROW acronym stands for goal, reality, options, and will. This four-step coaching model helps users define where they want to go and outline the steps they need to take to get them there.
OSKAR Coaching Model: The OSKAR coaching model acronym stands for outcome, scaling, know-how, affirm, and review and focuses on finding solutions to problems.
KPI: A KPI, or key performance indicator, measure how effective a company is at achieving its key business objectives.
Engagement surveys
Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): Employee net promoter score, or eNPS, is a metric that measures employee satisfaction. To measure eNPS, companies first must ask “On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our organization to your family or friends?” on an employee engagement survey. The results are divided into three groups: promoters (anyone who responded a 9 or 10), passives (7-8), and detractors (0-6).
Employee Engagement Survey: Employee engagement surveys collect anonymous feedback, quantify employee happiness, and measure attitudes towards a company’s work environment. Many companies choose to put out annual or semi-annual engagement surveys with a few pulse surveys scattered throughout the year, but the survey cadence ultimately depends on the organization and its needs.
External Survey Benchmarks: External survey benchmarks are made of engagement survey data from companies that are of a similar size or in a specific industry or region. The data serves as a standard against which similar businesses can compare their results to see if their survey performance is strong or poor for their type of company.
Internal Survey Benchmarks: Internal survey benchmarks compare your company’s own survey results to previous surveys that were conducted with the same methodology.
Likert Scale: Developed in 1932, the Likert scale measures attitudes by asking survey respondents to answer a prompt with one of five possible answers: strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, or strongly disagree.
Open-Ended Question: An open-ended question cannot be answered by a “yes” or “no” response. They require the survey respondent to write a response in their own words, instead of selecting from a set of predetermined answers.
Pulse Survey: Pulse surveys are quick one to five question surveys that bridge the gaps between bigger annual or semi-annual engagement surveys. They allow HR teams to get a more continuous look at how engagement initiatives are affecting employee sentiment.
Learning and Development
Asynchronous Learning: Asynchronous learning gives students the freedom to take classes whenever is convenient for their schedule, allowing employees to learn at their own pace.
Blended Learning: Blended learning, or hybrid learning, is a combination of face-to-face classroom-style and online learning.
Classroom Learning: Classroom learning is a learning approach in which an instructor and students meet in a traditional classroom setting.
Experiential Learning: Experiential learning has students “learn by doing” by applying learned material and skills to real-life scenarios.
Instructor-Led Training (ILT): Instructor-led training refers to any online or in-person learning or training that is facilitated by an instructor.
e-Learning: E-learning, or electronic learning, is any learning course delivered online through software or a website.
Learning and Development (L&D): Learning and development, or L&D, is an HR function focused on teaching employees the skills they need to help the business succeed.
Learning Management Software (LMS): Learning management software, or an LMS, is software that helps businesses administer, track, and report on employee e-learning.
Manager Training: Manager training programs have a curriculum developed to teach and refine the skills managers need to navigate the modern workplace, like giving and receiving feedback, leading through change, communicating with employees, and more. Most organizations split manager training into two programs, new manager training and existing manager training, to better focus on the needs of each segment.
Micro Learning: Micro learning is an e-learning approach that has students consume information in small, bite-sized segments.
Skill Gap: A skill gap is when there is a disparity between the skills employees possess and the skills their employer wants or needs. Internal training programs and L&D initiatives can help reduce the gap and invest in current talent to meet the business’ evolving needs.
Synchronous Learning: Synchronous learning is online learning that happens at the same time for every participant. Classes are live, allowing instructors to answer questions in real-time, encourage class discussions, and break students into smaller groups for interactive activities.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Ally: Allies are people who are willing to use their voice, privilege, or actions to help bring attention to the issues facing minority groups and ensure action is taken to create a more equitable experience for everyone. It’s important to note that there’s a difference between performative allyship, or individuals who claim to support minority groups but whose actions don’t back up their claims, and effective allyship, or individuals who are committed to taking action to create an equal and inclusive world.
Affinity Bias: Affinity bias is the unconscious tendency to get along with individuals who are similar to ourselves. For example, a hiring manager might favor a job candidate with a similar career background to their own over another candidate, as the commonality positively impacts their impression of the candidate.
Ageism: Ageism is prejudice or discrimination based on someone’s age.
BIPOC: An acronym standing for Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
Belonging: Workplace belonging allows every employee to feel they can bring their authentic selves to work and still feel valued, appreciated, and included.
Cisgender: A cisgender person has a gender identity that corresponds with their biological sex.
Conscious Bias: Conscious bias, or explicit bias, is when an individual intentionally treats another individual differently (positively or negatively) based on their race, age, ethnicity, gender, ability, religion, or sexual orientation.
Disability: The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) defines disability as “a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.” Under the law, it is illegal for a business to discriminate against a job candidate or employee because of their disability.
Dead Name: The name a transgender person was given at birth but no longer uses after their transition.
Gender Identity: Gender identity is an individual’s internal sense of being male, female, both, or neither. It’s important to note that someone’s gender identity can be different from their birth sex.
Inclusion: A culture of inclusion ensures that every employee, regardless of race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, or ability, feels welcome in the workplace.
Employee Resource Groups (ERGs): Employee resource groups are employee-led affinity groups that aim to make the workplace more diverse and inclusive. ERGs are typically made up of employees who share the same gender, race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, or sexuality, although an employee doesn’t have to identify as a member of that group to participate.
Ethnicity: An ethnicity is a group of people who share a common culture, language, traditions, nationality, or religion. While race is sometimes defined by someone’s physical appearance, ethnicity is a broader term that takes into account an individual’s cultural affiliation.
LGBTQIA: An acronym standing for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, and asexual or allied. The acronym has grown to be more inclusive over the years.
Microaggression: Psychiatrist and Harvard University professor Chester Pierce first used the term in 1920 to describe the insults and small slights he regularly witnessed non-black Americans direct towards African Americans. Today, the meaning of the term has evolved to include any verbal or nonverbal insult targeted towards people belonging to a marginalized group. For example, repeatedly asking a woman to take notes in a meeting can be a microaggression as it can imply the only value she will add to the meeting is by marking down what others say.
Non-binary: An individual who identifies outside of the typical male and female gender binary. Other common terms include genderqueer, third gender, agender, bigender, and more.
Privilege: Privilege is a special advantage that’s available only to a particular person or group based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religion, or socioeconomic status.
Pronouns: Pronouns are words used in conversation to refer to a person’s gender, like he, she, or they. Some people may go by pronouns that differ from their birth sex or prefer to use gender-neutral alternatives, like they/them or ze/zir.
Prejudice: Prejudice is a preconceived opinion, feeling, or attitude that someone holds towards an individual or group based on certain traits that are not based on reason or actual experience. Prejudice is typically based on stereotyping, or viewing a group of people as “all the same,” and can be based on a number of factors including gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, age, religion, and socioeconomic status.
Racism: Racism is prejudice or discrimination against someone due to their race or ethnic group. It is most commonly directed at members of minority or marginalized groups.
Sexism: Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on someone’s sex or gender. While it’s more common for women to experience sexism in the workplace, men can fall victim to sexism as well.
Sexual Harassment: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission defines sexual harassment as any conduct that “explicitly or implicitly affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment.” This includes “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature.”
Sexual Orientation: An individual’s sexual identity based on their romantic or sexual attraction to other people. Some common sexual orientations include heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and asexual.
Transgender: A transgender person is someone whose gender identity does not align with their birth sex.
Unconscious Bias: Unconscious bias, sometimes referred to as implicit bias, is a prejudice a person subconsciously carries in favor or against a thing, person, or group. This form of bias is our brain’s attempt to quickly categorize our experiences, but can actually cause us to discriminate against others for anything from race to weight, age, or educational background if not kept in check.
HR Metrics
Career Path Ratio: Career path ratio is an HR metric that compares your company’s share of promotions to the number of lateral moves. To calculate it, use this formula:
Career Path Ratio = Total Promotions ÷ (Total Transfers + Total Promotions)
Career path ratio tells you how employees move within your organization. If you promote too many employees, your business can quickly become “top-heavy,” while a lack of advancement opportunities can force employees to leave. A healthy career path ratio is around 0.25.
Cost Per Hire: Cost-per-hire calculates the average amount of money your organization spends on a new hire. It combines internal costs, like recruiter salaries, employee referral bonuses, and interview costs, with external costs, like job board fees, candidate travel expenses, recruiting event costs, and signing bonuses, to help your team assess the efficiency and effectiveness of your recruiting budget allocations. To calculate the metric, use the following formula:
Cost Per Hire = (Total Internal + External Recruiting Costs) / (Total # of New Hires in a Given Time Frame)
Compa-Ratio: Compa-ratio compares an employee’s current salary to the midpoint of their position’s salary range and can be used to inform how much an employee should be paid based on their experience and qualifications as well as inform how much they should receive for a merit increase. To calculate compa-ratio, use this formula:
Compa-ratio = ( Employee’s Current Salary / Salary Midpoint ) x 100
A compa-ratio of 1.0 means an employee is paid at the salary range’s midpoint, while a value of .75 indicates they are paid 75% less than the salary midpoint.
Offer Acceptance Rate (OAR): Offer acceptance rate, or OAR, is the percentage of job candidates who accepted a job offer extended by your company. To calculate this common recruiting metric:
Offer Acceptance Rate = ( Total # Of Accepted Offers / Total # Of Offers Extended ) x 100.
Profit Per Employee: Profit per employee, or net income per employee, is a rough measurement of how much profit each employee generates for the company during a given period. Here’s how to calculate profit per employee:
Profit Per Employee = Net Profit / Total # of Employees
Quality of Hire: Quality of hire measures the value a new hire brings to your organization. Because there is no standard formula for quality of hire, every company must first define what makes a new hire successful in order to measure this HR metric. Example indicators include pre-hire assessment performance, job performance, manager satisfaction, and employee satisfaction. Once you’ve determined your indicators, set an individual employee’s score for each category and then divide the sum by the total number of indicators. That is your quality of hire score.
Quality of Hire (%) = [ Indicator 1 (%) + Indicator 2 (%) + Indicator 3 (%)... ] / Total # of Indicators
Revenue Per Employee: Revenue per employee is a rough measurement of how much money each employee generates for the company. Combined with profit per employee, this ratio can help businesses measure increases and decreases in employee efficiency. To calculate revenue per employee, use this formula:
Revenue Per Employee = Total Revenue / Total # of Employees
Time-to-Fill: Time-to-fill measures how many days your entire hiring process takes, from the moment you open a role to when an offer is officially accepted. This metric helps you determine how long similar roles will take to fill in the future. To calculate it, use this formula:
Time-to-Fill = The Day The Job Candidate Accepted Your Offer - The Day The Role Was Opened
Time-to-Hire: Time to hire is the amount of time that elapses from when you first engage a job candidate to when they accept your offer. It helps you measure the efficiency of your hiring process and identify which stages of the hiring process can be improved.
Time to Hire = The Day The Job Candidate Accepted Your Offer - The Day The Candidate Entered The Hiring Pipeline
Turnover Rate: Turnover rate is the percentage of employees who departed your company, voluntarily or involuntarily, during a given period of time. You can calculate your business’ turnover rate with this formula:
Turnover Rate = [ # of Employees Who Left Your Company / ( ( # of Employees at Beginning of Period - # of Employees at End of Period) x 2) ) ] x 100
Recruiting
Active Candidate: A candidate who is actively seeking new employment opportunities and applying for jobs.
Applicant Tracking System (ATS): An applicant tracking system is software that streamlines and helps automate the hiring process. It empowers recruiting teams to post job listings on job boards, screen candidates, schedule interviews, collect candidate feedback, and analyze applicant data.
Ban-the-Box: The Ban-the-Box movement aims to remove the check box commonly found on job applications that requires job applicants to identify whether or not they have been convicted of a crime in the past. Supporters of the movement believe removing the box will remove bias from the hiring process and promote fair hiring practices.
Behavioral Interview: A behavioral interview asks candidates to share how they handled specific work-related scenarios in the past so interviewers can better understand how they would behave in similar situations in the future.
Boomerang Employee: A boomerang employee is a former employee who, after leaving your company for a period of time, gets hired again by your company.
Candidate Experience: Candidate experience is what impression a job applicant had after going through your company’s recruitment process, from application to rejection or offer.
Candidate Satisfaction: Candidate satisfaction measures a candidate’s impression of your interview and hiring experience. Because candidate experience directly impacts recruiting outcomes, most companies send out a survey to job applicants to collect feedback on how they can improve their candidate experience.
Cover Letter: A cover letter is submitted alongside a resume to add additional color around a job applicant’s skills, competencies, and experience.
Culture Add: Culture add not only means that a job candidate’s or employee’s beliefs and behaviors align with your company’s core values and culture, but that they also bring something different or unique to the table.
Culture Fit: Cultural fit means that a job candidate’s beliefs and behaviors are in line with an employer’s core values and company culture. This hiring approach is somewhat controversial as unconscious bias influences people to hire candidates similar to themselves, which can lead to the creation of homogeneous teams and hurt diversity initiatives.
CV: A CV stands for curriculum vitae, or “course of life” in Latin. While similar to a resume, a CV is a longer document that details a candidate’s entire career and lists personal achievements including awards, honors, and published works. It is usually reserved for jobs in an academic setting.
Diverse Interview Slate: A diverse interview slate contains a specific number or percentage of women or minority candidates, based on targets set by your organization.
Employee Referral: A job candidate who was recommended for an open role by an existing employee. Oftentimes, companies have an incentive program to encourage current employees to reach out to their professional networks and find qualified candidates for current job postings.
Employer Brand: Your employer brand is how you market your company to job seekers. It’s a combination of your business’ reputation (e.g. Glassdoor reviews and word of mouth), your overall brand reputation, and your value proposition for potential future employees.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC): This federal agency oversees and enforces a series of laws that prohibit job discrimination in the workplace. They ensure company’s don’t discriminate against someone on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, pregnancy, or disability. The agency also enforces The Equal Pay Act of 1963, which makes it illegal for a company to pay different wages to men and women performing the same job.
Group Interview: A group interview can have two meanings. The first definition of a group interview is when a representative of your company interviews multiple candidates at the same time. This practice is typically used if you need to hire a large volume of people in a short amount of time. The second definition refers to when a team of employees forms an interview panel to interview one candidate at the same time.
Hard Skills: Hard skills are related to technical knowledge that can make a job candidate a more effective employee, like writing, coding, or analytics skills.
Hiring Manager: A hiring manager is the primary decision-maker in charge of deciding which candidate to hire for an open role.
Hiring Manager Satisfaction: Hiring manager satisfaction is a performance score that indicates the success of a recent new hire. A simple survey question of, “How satisfied are you with your new hire’s performance on a scale of 1-10?” can help you identify how to improve the hiring process and the caliber of future hires.
Job Board: A website companies use to advertise their open roles to candidates. Some common job boards include LinkedIn, Glassdoor, CareerBuilder, and Monster.
Job Description: A job description is a formal description of an open role’s title and responsibilities. It also typically includes information about the company, including its mission and values, as well as the qualifications that an ideal applicant would have and the benefits offered for the role.
Job Poaching: Poaching is when a company offers a job to a competitor’s employee. It is typically more common in niche industries or for technical roles that require a specific skillset.
Job Requisition (REC): A job requisition is a document created by hiring managers to request a new hire. It includes details about the role including the need for the hire, the budget, the new role’s job title, employee classification, and job description.
Non-Compete Clause: A non-compete clause is a section in an employee’s contract that states they cannot start their own company in the same industry or work for a competitor during or after their employment with your company. It protects the company’s proprietary company and prevents an employee from bringing trade secrets to a competitor. There is no such standard duration for a non-compete clause, it is at the discretion of the two agreeing parties; however, the courts tend to not uphold excessively long non-competes.
Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA): A non-disclosure agreement, or confidentiality agreement, protects a business’ sensitive information and trade secrets by preventing an employee, candidate, client, or vendor from sharing that information with a third party. It is a legally binding document, so if a party violates the agreement, the parties can take legal action.
Passive Candidate: A candidate who is not actively seeking new employment opportunities. Although passive candidates are typically content with their current roles, they can sometimes be convinced to apply for an open role if a recruiter reaches out with an enticing offer.
Portfolio: A collection of past work and projects a job candidate shares to showcase their abilities and skills.
Reference: An individual who can vouch for the skills and abilities of a job candidate. Typically, a job candidate will share the contact information of a former employer or colleague who can speak to their professional achievements, strengths, and weaknesses. A candidate might also volunteer a personal reference or someone from their personal life who can shed more color on their personality, character, values, and goals.
Resume: A resume is a document summarizing a job candidate’s past education and relevant work experience, as well as any skills, competencies, and awards that can show a recruiter how qualified they are for a role.
Screening: Talent screening allows you to assess a candidate’s qualifications before moving them forward to a phone screen. Some common screening processes, aside from resume reviewing, include: skills assessments, work samples, personality or cognitive tests, and video interviewing. Some applicant tracking systems use artificial intelligence to assist with talent screening.
Skills Assessment: A skills assessment evaluates candidates' skills to determine if they would be successful in a specific role.
Social Recruiting: Social recruiting, or social hiring and social media recruitment, uses social media channels, like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as other websites, like Glassdoor, job boards, and blogs, to advertise your company’s open roles, source talent, and showcase why your business is a great place to work.
Soft Skills: Soft skills are non-technical skills that impact how you work. They include communication and social skills, as well as character or personality traits. Some examples of soft skills are time-management, organization, creativity, and adaptability.
Sourcing: Sourcing talent is the process of finding and engaging with potential job candidates to grow your talent pipeline. Some popular ways to source talent are nurturing employee referrals, using LinkedIn, attending networking events, and investing in employer branding.
Source-of-Hire: Source-of-hire shares what percentage of your new hires entered your talent pipeline from each recruiting source, like a job board, employee referral, or internal hire, for example. It can help you measure your recruiting team’s effectiveness and inform where you should double down or cut back on recruiting investments. Typically, applicant tracking systems can determine the source of hire and give you a detailed breakdown of your most popular and effective recruiting channels.
Situational Interview: A situational interview presents a job candidate with a situation they might face in their potential new roles and assesses how they would react, respond, and behave when faced with a problem.
Structured Interview Process: This interview process standardizes the interview process for every candidate by asking them all the same questions and using the same scale to rate them. This approach gives every candidate an equal opportunity to present their knowledge, skills, and experience, while also helping remove bias from the interview process.
Talent Pipeline: A talent pipeline is a pool of internal and external job candidates that have the skills and competencies to fill a vacant role.
Talent Pool: A talent pool is broader than a talent pipeline as it contains job candidates whose skills and qualifications have not yet been vetted by your company. If a talent pool candidate is deemed qualified for a role, they will become a part of your talent pipeline.
Technical Interview: A technical interview assesses a candidate’s technical knowledge and skills with a series of problem-solving questions and technical skills assessments. These types of interviews are most commonly used to hire engineering, I.T., and science roles.
