Every corner of recruiting and hiring has its own acronyms and terms, and most of them get used as if everyone already knows what they mean. Candidates run into words they have never seen in the middle of the most stressful process of their year. Recruiters inherit a whole vocabulary that nobody ever actually sits down and explains. And there is no good plain-English place to look any of it up.
So we made one. Below is a running glossary of the terms we see most often across hiring, written the way we would explain them to a friend. It is for candidates trying to make sense of a process, for recruiters who want a clean reference, and for the hiring managers and business owners who hire only now and then but are still responsible for getting it right, especially as privacy and AI rules attach real stakes to terms like ADS and ADM. We will keep adding to it.
AI and automated decisions
Automated Decision System (ADS): Software that uses data and computation to make or heavily shape a decision about a person, such as scoring, ranking, or filtering job applicants. Many resume screeners and one-way video scorers are an ADS, which is why hiring regulations increasingly name the category directly. New York City, California, Colorado, and others now have rules aimed at it.
Automated Decision Making (ADM): A decision made by a system with little or no meaningful human involvement. It is the term privacy law uses, including the European Union's GDPR, which gives people rights when a significant decision about them, like a job rejection, is made this way. An ADS is the tool, and ADM is what happens when a human is not really in the loop.
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): The European Union's data-privacy law. It controls how organizations collect and use people's personal data and gives individuals rights over it, including a say when a significant decision about them is made by a machine alone. In hiring, it shapes what you can do with a candidate's data and how automated screening is allowed to work.
CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act): California's data-privacy law, the closest US counterpart to GDPR. It gives California residents the right to know what personal data a company holds about them, to delete it, and to opt out of its sale. Later amendments, known as the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), extended it to cover some applicant and employee data.
State privacy laws: The United States has no single federal privacy law, so states have passed their own. California's CCPA and CPRA came first, followed by comprehensive laws in Virginia (VCDPA), Colorado (CPA), Texas (TDPSA), and a growing list of others, including Connecticut, Utah, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Oregon, Delaware, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Rhode Island. If you hire across state lines, what you can do with a candidate's data can change depending on where that person lives.
The systems and tools
Applicant Tracking System (ATS): The software a company uses to collect, store, and move applications through its hiring process. Most online applications you submit land in one. For recruiters it is the system of record. For candidates it is often the reason a resume needs the right words to get seen at all. Common ones include Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, iCIMS, and Workday Recruiting.
Human Resources Information System (HRIS): The core database for employee records, things like payroll, benefits, time off, and job history. It runs the people side of a company after someone is hired, rather than the hiring itself. Common ones include Workday, BambooHR, ADP, Rippling, and UKG.
Human Capital Management (HCM) suite: A broader bundle of software that ties recruiting, onboarding, payroll, performance, and HR data together in one platform. Think of it as an HRIS plus most of the tools around it. Examples include Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM Cloud, and UKG.
Recruitment CRM (Candidate Relationship Management): A system for building and keeping relationships with people who are not applicants yet. It works like a sales CRM, except the pipeline is future candidates instead of future customers. Common ones include Gem, Beamery, and Avature.
Recruitment automation: Software that handles repetitive recruiting tasks on its own, such as posting jobs, screening resumes, scheduling interviews, and sending follow-ups. It saves recruiters real time, and done carelessly it is also how good candidates get filtered out by a machine. Examples include scheduling tools like GoodTime, sourcing tools like SeekOut and hireEZ, and chatbots like Paradox.
Performance management system: The software and process used to set goals, give feedback, and review how employees are doing over time. It picks up long after hiring and onboarding are finished. Common ones include Lattice, 15Five, and Culture Amp.
Roles and how hiring gets done
Talent acquisition (TA): The overall function of finding, attracting, and hiring people. It usually implies a more strategic view than recruiting, with weight on long-term pipeline and workforce planning rather than filling one open seat.
Recruitment: The hands-on work of filling specific open roles. In practice people use recruitment and talent acquisition interchangeably, though TA tends to imply the wider strategy.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO): Hiring an outside company to run some or all of your recruiting. The provider acts as your recruiting team, often for a set period or a specific hiring push. Providers include Cielo, Korn Ferry, and Randstad Sourceright.
Full-cycle recruiting: One recruiter owning every step of a role, from intake to sourcing to screening to offer. Also called 360 recruiting. The opposite is a split model where sourcers, recruiters, and coordinators each handle one stage.
Sourcing: The work of finding candidates who have not applied, usually by searching LinkedIn, databases, and networks. A sourcer builds the top of the funnel, and a recruiter usually carries people through it.
Job requisition (req): The formal, approved request to fill a role, with the budget, title, and headcount attached. A recruiter cannot really start until a req is open, which is why recruiters talk about how many reqs they are carrying.
Intake meeting: The kickoff conversation between a recruiter and the hiring manager to agree on what the role actually needs before sourcing begins. Skipping it is how searches quietly go sideways.
Sourcing and pipeline
Inbound hiring: Filling roles from people who come to you, through applications, referrals, and your careers page. It scales cheaply, and in the AI era it can also bury a team in volume.
Outbound hiring: Filling roles by reaching out to people directly, usually candidates who are not job hunting. Slower and more targeted than inbound.
Active and passive candidates: Active candidates are looking for a job now. Passive candidates are employed and not looking, but open to the right conversation. Most outbound sourcing targets the passive group.
Talent pool: A group of candidates a company has already identified and keeps on file for current or future roles.
Talent pooling: The ongoing practice of building and maintaining those groups, so that when a role opens there are warm people to call rather than a blank page.
Talent pipeline: The set of candidates already moving toward, or waiting on, specific roles. A pool is the reservoir, and a pipeline is the flow.
Boolean search: A way of searching with words like AND, OR, and NOT to narrow candidate results. It is a core sourcing skill, even as search tools increasingly do it for you.
Screening and interviewing
Pre-employment screening: The checks done before a hire is final, which can include background checks, reference checks, right-to-work verification, and skills or personality assessments. Background-check vendors include Checkr, HireRight, and Sterling, and skills-assessment platforms include HackerRank, Codility, and Criteria.
Skills-based hiring: Deciding on candidates based on what they can actually do, shown through work samples, assessments, or demonstrated results, rather than proxies like pedigree or years on a resume. The whole idea is to judge evidence over assumptions.
Evidence-based hiring: Making hiring decisions from real proof of what a candidate can do, such as work samples, structured assessments, and demonstrated results, rather than gut feel or proxies like pedigree. It sits right next to skills-based hiring, with the emphasis on the evidence behind each decision.
Skill catfishing: Also called skillfishing. When a candidate overstates or invents skills, tools, or experience to get past screening, often encouraged by keyword filters that reward the right words over real ability. The cost usually shows up later, once the person is on the job.
Structured interview: An interview where every candidate gets the same planned questions, scored against the same criteria. It is far more predictive of job performance than a free-flowing chat, and far more defensible if a hiring decision is ever challenged.
Asynchronous video interview (one-way video): A format where a candidate records answers to set questions on their own time, and the team reviews them later. No live scheduling, and everyone answers the same prompts. Also called async video or one-way interviewing. Examples include HireVue, Spark Hire, and Willo.
Take-home assignment (work sample): A task that mirrors real work, given to candidates so a team can judge the output instead of the interview polish.
Panel interview: One candidate meeting several interviewers at once, or in a set sequence, often to gather multiple perspectives in less time.
Candidate experience and employer brand
Candidate experience: How it feels to go through a company's hiring process, from the first click to the final yes or no. Poor experience quietly costs companies applicants, referrals, and sometimes customers.
Candidate journey: The full path a candidate travels, from first hearing about a role to onboarding. Candidate experience is the quality of that journey.
Employer branding: The reputation a company has as a place to work, and the deliberate effort to shape it. It is what candidates believe about you before they ever talk to you.
Employer Value Proposition (EVP): The specific promise of what someone gets in return for working somewhere, across pay, growth, culture, and purpose. It is the core message employer branding is built to communicate.
Ghosting: When one side goes silent with no reply. It happens with candidates who disappear on a recruiter, and just as often with companies that never follow up. Common, corrosive, and avoidable.
Onboarding: Everything that helps a new hire get set up, trained, and productive once they start. Hiring ends at the offer, and onboarding is what makes the hire actually work.
Offer and counteroffer: The offer is the formal proposal of the job and its terms. A counteroffer is a revised proposal from either side, or a competing offer a candidate's current employer makes to keep them.
The numbers hiring teams track
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): The handful of metrics a team holds itself to. In recruiting these usually include the ones below.
Time to fill: How long it takes from a role opening to a candidate accepting, counted from the day the req opens. It shows how fast the pipeline moves.
Time to hire: How long it takes from a candidate entering the process to accepting an offer. It measures the candidate's experience of speed rather than the whole search.
Cost per hire: The total spend to make one hire, including advertising, tools, agency fees, and recruiter time, divided by the number of hires.
Quality of hire: A measure of how well new hires actually perform and stay, usually judged once they have been on the job a while. The hardest metric to pin down, and the one that matters most.
Source of hire: Where successful hires came from, such as referrals, inbound applications, or outbound sourcing. It shows which channels are worth the money.
Offer acceptance rate: The share of offers that candidates say yes to. A low rate usually points to problems with pay, speed, or experience.