Accessibility Book a Demo

Glossary of recruitment terms

Tribepad’s Glossary is designed to help develop your knowledge and further understand the technology and recruitment industries terminology.

Active Candidate

An active candidate is an individual who is actively seeking employment. They will have updated CVs, and profiles on social media and job board sites. In comparison to a passive candidate, an active candidate is either out of work, or is not happy within their current job role. Active candidates are more than likely to take phone calls from recruiters, respond to ads and engage further with a recruiter.

Active/Passive

Active or passive describes whether a candidate is currently looking for a job (active) or not (passive). 

Active jobseekers are usually easier to source and more open to conversations with recruiters but harder to hire, because competition for them is higher. Passive candidates can be hard to reach but you have more exclusive access.

That’s why many recruitment teams focus on building talent pools of passive candidates. 

ADA Compliant

ADA stands for Americans with Disabilities Act. A website that is ADA Compliant must ensure that certain standards are met so that all electronic and information technology must be accessible to those individuals with disabilities.

Agency Recruitment

Recruitment agencies work with multiple organisations to find and place candidates. They can be expensive but often have a brilliant network, which often makes them a good fit for hard-to-fill roles. Mostly you’ll pay a proportion of successful candidates’ final salary so it’s no win, no fee.

Analytics

There are multiple reports that can be run within the recruitment software. Reports and smarter analytics within the recruitment software, will allow for the recruiter to analyse data, identify how to improve the recruitment process plus highlight any issues.

Anonymous Applications

Anonymous Applications – or blind CVs – refers to the anonymisation of identifying candidate details from CVs, before your recruiters or hiring managers see them. Anonymous Applications is an important weapon against unconscious bias, in the battle for fairer, more inclusive recruitment.

Applicant

An applicant is an active jobseeker who has applied for one of your jobs.

Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

An ATS is recruitment software that helps you keep track of candidates throughout the hiring process

Applicant tracking systems range from basic databases of information to whole-hog hiring machines suitable for complex, global recruitment. Most ATS will include sensible automation to accelerate time-to-hire and support recruitment reporting. 

ATS is interchangeable with recruitment software, recruitment tech, hiring technology, talent acquisition technology, and so on.

Application Programme Interface

Application Program Interface (API) allows our software to communicate with third party solutions that enhance the features and data of our application providing a better experience to customers and users.

Attraction

Candidate attraction refers to the tools and tactics you use to attract potential candidates to apply for your jobs or enter your talent pools.

In contrast to sourcing, attraction is an inbound method of recruitment that relies on candidates to come to you. Employer branding is a candidate attraction strategy, along with job adverts.

Automation

Automation is when recruitment software does a process automatically, instead of recruiters doing the process manually. Common automation workflows in recruitment include pre-screening and candidate assessments

Boolean

Boolean was created by George Boole, who was a mathematician and computer pioneer. Boolean is a system of logical thought and will be often found when searching the web. For example when searching a candidate’s profile, if you search for ‘Project AND Manager’ you will find results that contains both of the words/value. However, if you search for ‘Project OR Manager’, then you will find results that contain one or the other, not both. Even better, if you search for “Project Manager” in speech/quote marks (“), it gives you an exact return on our search criteria.

This tool is highly beneficial to recruiters when searching candidate profiles or CVs

Business case

A business case is an internal-facing document or presentation that builds your case for investment in new recruitment software. (Here’s how to build one). 

Candidate

Different teams use ‘candidate’ differently. Typically, a candidate means someone who’s currently within your recruitment process and has been qualified to some extent – like passing your killer questions.

Candidate can also refer to anyone who was previously in-process for you. Prospective candidates are people who potentially could become candidates in the future.  

Candidate assessment

Candidate assessment is one way of screening candidates, via testing. This is also called pre-employment testing. (Here are eight reasons to add candidate assessments to your recruitment process.)

Candidate database

A candidate database is the place where you store candidate information. 

Spreadsheets can operate as a database, but they’re not easily searchable and they demand a lot of manual data entry. A candidate database is the foundation of an ATS, which uses automation and clever search functionality to make your candidate data more useful.

Candidate Engagement

Candidate engagement describes the process of interacting with candidates during the recruitment process. Keeping candidates informed is critical to the candidate experience

Candidate engagement can also be used to talk about maintaining relationships with prospective candidates and passive candidates who aren’t actively in-process with you. See nurturing. 

Candidate Experience (CX)

Candidate experience refers to the experience candidates have throughout the end-to-end recruitment process. A fast, fair, transparent candidate experience is critical to your employer brand. Poor CX is a major driver of high dropouts

Candidate Management System

Candidate Management System is another name for an Applicant Tracking System. It’s a tool that locates, tracks, monitors and manages candidates for open positions. A Candidate Management System usually has talent pools that have been created by recruiters as applications have come through the system. Recruiters have the ability to engage with each other and candidates within the Candidate Management System, in order to arrange interviews for example.

Candidate relationship management (CRM)

CRM refers to how you nurture relationships with your candidates, typically passive candidates. CRM software is tech that supports and tracks this process – like by powering recruitment campaigns. Most modern ATS also offer CRM functionality.

Candidate-driven market

In a candidate-driven market (or candidate-led market), candidates are in the driving seat. There are fewer candidates than the roles available, so each candidate has more choice about where they go. 

This increases competition and pushes up your time-to-hire and cost-per-hire (because recruitment’s harder). A candidate-driven market puts a premium on candidate experience, employer branding, and recruitment marketing.  

Careers Site

Your careers site is a website (or page on your website) where prospective candidates can explore your jobs and apply. A good careers site includes broad info about your organisation and culture and is a core component of your employer brand

Centralised recruitment

Centralised recruitment is a model where one centralised talent team handle recruitment – as opposed to decentralised recruitment. This central team are responsible for setting recruitment strategy and standardising recruitment processes. 

In this model, hiring managers have less control over recruitment. 

Compliance

In a recruitment context, compliance typically refers to the checks and balances you should do before making a hire. For example, this might include references and checking right-to-work documentation. Compliance is part of onboarding.  

Cost per hire

Cost per hire measures the costs associated with recruiting a new employee, like sourcing costs, advertising costs, and agency costs. It’s one of the most important metrics for recruitment reporting. 

CV parsing

Parsing refers to the automatic conversion of a free-form CV into a structured data format in a new location – like pulling CVs from Indeed into your ATS. CV parsing saves lots of time for recruiters and candidates by removing manual data entry.

CV Searching

Recruiters now have the ability to search CVs to see if they have the right qualifications, experience and skill sets for the position. Tribepad’s recruitment management software searches thousands of CVs in less than 0.01 of a second, narrowing down a large amount of applications into a smaller, more manageable pool.

Data Migration

Data migration is the process of moving data from one system to another. With regards to recruitment software, this involves transferring existing, valuable client and candidate data from one recruitment technology to another. This process can be quite a complex process as not all recruitment technologies are programmed the same way.

Decentralised recruitment

Decentralised recruitment is a model where hiring managers and/or recruiters within different business units have control over recruitment decision-making. It’s the opposite of centralised recruitment

There’s usually a central team providing oversight and support, but this model allows hiring managers more freedom and flexibility over the hiring process

Dropouts

Dropouts are candidates who don’t complete your recruitment process, whether that’s during application, interview, or after you’ve made them an offer. 

High dropouts are often the result of too-slow time to hire (candidates are hired somewhere else) or a poor candidate experience (candidates get frustrated). 

E-Recruitment

E-Recruitment is another name for online recruitment. Online recruitment is a way to attract and recruit candidates for specific job openings. It enables recruiters to communicate, manage and track candidates during the hiring process electronically.

Electronic Forms

An electronic form (e-form) is a paperless form that is available online. An e-form is green. It removes the need for the use of paper, saves money with printing resources and allows for fields to be filled in online. Also, e-signatures can be added to e-forms which are accepted as a legal form of signature.

Tribepad presents e-forms for candidates and recruiters to fill out in order to create their profiles. There is also the ability to automatically fill in forms by parsing CVs or social media profiles.

Email marketing

In a recruitment context, email marketing is a form of recruitment marketing where you contact candidates or prospective candidates with recruitment-related messaging. 

Email Marketing

In a recruitment context, email marketing is a form of recruitment marketing where you contact candidates or prospective candidates with recruitment-related messaging. 

Employee referral

Employee referral is an internal hiring channel where existing employees recommend candidates from their network for a job. A great employee referral program delivers the highest quality hires, the shortest time-to-hire and the lowest cost-per-hire.

Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

Your EVP is your employer brand promise. It defines the value – the set of tangible and intangible benefits – your people get when they work with you. 

An authentic, unique, and compelling EVP is the foundation of world-class employer branding. (Here’s how to design your EVP). 

Employer Brand (EB)

Your employer brand is the set of associations that prospective candidates have about you as an employer. It’s closely connected to your commercial brand. 

Your employer brand is the difference between you and your talent competitors. Building a strong employer brand makes it easier, faster, and cheaper to hire the right people. 

Employer-driven market

In contrast to a candidate-driven market, an employer-driven market happens where there are more roles than suitable candidates. This means candidates are in higher competition, and employers have more choice about who and how to hire.

Equality, diversity, and inclusion (ED&I)

ED&I – also called D&I, DEI and so on – refers to the broad practice of creating a fairer, more inclusive, more diverse environment. In a recruitment context, ED&I commonly focusses on removing unconscious bias and building a fair, inclusive process that helps improve workforce representation.

Ghosting

Ghosting happens when an applicant or candidate enters your recruitment process but doesn’t hear back, or vice versa. 

Our End Ghosting Report 2023 found that ghosting has decreased by nearly a third since 2022 but still happens to 43% of candidates. One of the main components of a poor candidate experience, ghosting is one of the quickest ways to damage your employer brand.

Hard-to-fill

Hard-to-fill roles are those that it’s especially difficult, time-consuming, or expensive to hire into. Every industry has its own. Most often, roles are hard-to-fill because of skills shortages. Roles might also be hard-to-fill because they’re very senior, specialised, or considered unattractive by jobseekers.

Hiring for hard-to-fill roles often needs a different recruitment strategy, and many organisations lean more heavily on agencies for these positions. 

Hiring

Hiring is the process of a company, contractually employing an individual for an agreed payment. It is normally a recruiter or human resource manager who is involved in the process of advertising vacancies, screening candidates, conducting interviews and providing the relevant documentation for an individual to sign, prior to being listed as an employee within the company.

Hiring managers

This refers to your managers that are hiring. Hiring managers’ role can be very different depending whether your recruitment model is centralised, decentralised, or hybrid.

In every model, a strong relationship between hiring managers and recruiters is critical to bringing the best people into the business.

Hiring process

The hiring process, or recruitment process, refers to the end-to-end framework of how you bring new employees into the business. It includes planning, sourcing, screening, selection, hiring, and onboarding.  

Hybrid recruitment

Hybrid recruitment is a combination of decentralised and centralised recruitment. In this flexible model, individual units (like departments or geographies) have some flexibility but there’s still overarching central control over process and recruitment strategy.

In-house recruitment

The opposite of agency recruitment, in-house recruitment refers to an internal hiring team within an organisation. 

Internal mobility

Internal mobility refers to the movement of existing employees to other roles within an organisation. In smaller organisations this is usually more organic while larger enterprises often have a dedicated internal mobility strategy. 

Internet Service Provider (ISP)

An ISP or Internet Service Provider is a company that provides individuals with a service that allows them access to the Internet.

Job Board Integration

Candidate management systems have the ability to integrate with job boards in order to advertise and post vacancies. This involves setting expiration dates on specific vacancies, in comparison to other roles that might be ongoing. Positions can be posted on multiple job boards simultaneously saving time and effort. Candidates can view these vacancies on the job boards, and when they choose to click and apply for the role are unknowingly directed through to the candidate management system to complete the application. The candidate has the opportunity to parse their CV or social media profile in order to create their own profile on the candidate management system prior to the completion of the application process.

Job distribution

Job distribution is the process of distributing adverts across the different job boards and social media platforms you use. If you’re not using talent tech, this can be a hugely time-consuming, manual task. 

An ATS makes this much easier, allowing you to distribute jobs to lots of places with one click.

Killer question

Killer questions are a pre-screening question at the very start of the application journey, which result in automatic rejection if candidates give the wrong yes/no answer. For example, ‘are you eligible to work in the UK?’.

Killer questions mean recruiters don’t waste time reviewing CVs that are definitely unsuitable, and jobseekers don’t waste their time with a pointless recruitment process. 

Killer question

When building your candidate screening process you can set certain ‘killer questions’. These are critical elements of your recruitment process with a pass or fail gate. Candidates who fail the question (or don’t meet the required score) are automatically moved to a rejected state and emailed. Candidates who meet your criteria are moved to shortlist and automatically emailed.

Landing pages

A landing page is a standalone web page created for a specific campaign that someone ‘lands’ on when they click on your email, advert, or offer. A landing page has one focussed goal – like convincing prospects to complete a job application.

MI Reporting

MI reporting, also known as Management Information Reporting, is a communication method that allows ideas and concepts to be presented, and for companies to make the best led decisions for their business. It allows for companies to improve their business strategies. Take a look at our smarter analytics which gives you powerful, real-time data for your reports.

Nurturing

Nurturing means progressing passive candidates down the recruitment funnel by maintaining a warm relationship with them. This is a crucial step to managing talent pools. 

OFCCP Compliance

It is vital to be OFCCP compliant in the United States of America, as it ensure that all employers comply with laws and regulations to ensure non-discrimination. OFCCP stands for the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. At Tribepad we ensure that all referrers, CV searches, applicant click-throughs and applicant search results are stored securely. This allows for any OFCCP audits to be carried out if and when required. All the stored data will assist in the OFCCP audit.

Onboarding

Onboarding is the process of integrating a new hire into your organisation. It includes compliance, induction, training and development, welcome activities, ordering kit, and so on. Great onboarding boosts productivity, retention, and engagement.  

Parsing (CV Parsing)

The process of breaking down data, into smaller specific data in order for it to be transferred to a new location, i.e. CVs, can be parsed in order to fill in the relevant fields on an application form.CV parsing is beneficial to both recruiter and candidate as it creates more efficiencies within the recruitment process. Time spent filling in the relevant fields has been reduced significantly.

Passive Candidate

You will have heard the terms active candidates and passive candidates, but do you know the difference? A passive candidate is an individual who is not actively seeking a change in job role. They may be happy in their current position and are potentially loyal to that particular company. It is important however as a recruiter to build up a pool of passive candidates. Just because a passive candidate isn’t looking for a new position, doesn’t necessarily mean that they wouldn’t switch if presented with career progression for example.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC advertising lets you extend your reach by paying to advertise around specific keywords and phrases, most often on Google. Unlike SEO, which can take months of activity before you see results, PPC ads can drive traffic to your careers site immediately. 

Pre-screening

Pre-screening happens before screening to gather basic information about candidates, to work out whether they’re a good fit for further assessment.  

This happens using recruitment software to deliver pre-screening questionnaires and take automated actions based on the results (like shortlisting or rejecting). Pre-screening is essential for recruiters handling volume recruitment.

Programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising uses real-time performance data to decide where to post your ads for the best ROI. It’s a more cost-effective, data-driven way to match job adverts to job boards. Many talent tech platforms include programmatic job matching.

Prospective candidate

Prospective candidates are people who potentially could become candidates in the future. 

Qualified

When an applicant is qualified, they’ve been screened by the recruitment team (or the recruitment tech) and are a good fit for the role.  

Quality of hire

Quality of hire is a critical recruitment metric that measures the value new hires bring to the organisation. 

You can measure quality in different ways, like looking at early turnover, productivity, hiring manager feedback, performance reviews, or some combination of the lot. (Here are 31 practical suggestions to improve quality of hire).

Recruiting funnel

The recruiting funnel (or recruitment funnel) is a visualisation of the recruitment process according to the sales and marketing concept of a funnel. It speaks to the process of increasing awareness among prospective candidates at the top of the funnel through to hiring someone at the bottom of the funnel.

The typical funnel stages are awareness, consideration, interest, application, screening, selection, and hiring, although there’s lots of variation in specific terms. 

Recruiting Software

Recruiting software is a beneficial tool as it aids the recruitment process. It is also known as Applicant Tracking Software and can be used by businesses of all sizes. It provides the ability to manage applications, screen CVs, track candidates throughout the recruitment process plus many other features.

Tribepad’s Applicant Tracking Software has made talent acquisition and talent management easier than ever before. See our full list of Applicant Tracking System features.

Recruitment

Recruitment involves locating potential talent, screening candidates for qualifications and placing them in the perfect position. It is finding the right talent for the right role. The recruitment industry is complex, but with the aid of an Applicant Tracking System, this process is simplified.

Tribepad’s Applicant Tracking System makes finding top talent for the right position easier than ever. It makes the recruitment team more efficient, saving time and money and reduces agency costs.

Recruitment campaign

A recruitment campaign is a specific organised instance of the recruitment process with a clearly defined goal – like to get applications for a specific role or build your talent pool of diverse candidates.

Many organisations incorporate campaigns into their recruitment strategy, as it’s a proactive method of candidate attraction and can do wonders for your employer brand

A recruitment campaign usually includes different marketing collateral like content, landing pages, and email marketing. (Here’s a step-by-step guide to running a recruitment campaign). 

 

Recruitment marketing

Recruitment marketing refers broadly to the activities of proactively moving candidates through the recruitment funnel. It’s a shift from reactive sourcing to proactive engagement. (Read more here).

If you take a recruitment marketing approach, you’ll be running recruitment campaigns and working on developing your employer brand

Recruitment Marketing Automation

Tribepad has implemented a tool to automate and schedule emails and campaigns in order for recruiters to maintain a high level of engagement with candidates. This could be simply an update about where they are in the hiring process, an interview invitation with available dates and times or keeping a group of new starters engaged.

For passive candidates, this could involve sharing career opportunities, networking events and other relevant data that might be of interest to the candidate.

Recruitment metric

Recruitment metrics are standardised measurements to track the success of your recruitment process, and spot areas to improve. Good recruitment software should empower recruitment reporting on lots of relevant metrics, like cost-per-hire, source-of-hire and time-to-hire.

Recruitment reporting

Recruitment reporting is critical to track your success, prove ROI, and spot areas to keep improving. Slow, shallow reporting is often a major driver for growing organisations to start considering switching from spreadsheets to recruitment software. 

Recruitment strategy

A recruitment strategy is a clear plan for how your organisation will find and hire the people you need. A robust strategy is the foundation for any effective recruitment function. (Here’s more about building an effective recruitment strategy). 

Recruitment Technology

Recruitment Technology helps the Head of Resourcing and recruiters with their efforts to attract top talent. It is also known as recruitment software, and provides the ability to monitor recruitment techniques, manage applications, screen CVs, and track candidates throughout the hiring process.

Tribepad’s recruitment technology makes the talent acquisition process and talent management more efficient.

Resources (Knowledge Library)

Tribepad provides you with your own customised resources section. This enables you to share company information including corporate videos, employee testimonials, documentation and more. You can therefore promote the company brand, ethics plus insights into the vacancies, to demonstrate transparency. In addition to this, if you wish, you can allow candidates the ability to engage with each other.

Screening

Screening is the process of qualifying candidates and moving them through your recruitment process until making them an offer. It usually includes telephone or video interviews, hiring manager interviews, and possibly exec team interviews too.

Screening

Screening is the process of qualifying candidates and moving them through your recruitment process until making them an offer. It usually includes telephone or video interviews, hiring manager interviews, and possibly exec team interviews too.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of improving your organic (unpaid) ranking on search engines for chosen key terms by making your pages more findable, relevant, and engaging. Unlike PPC, SEO is a long-term strategy but can ultimately drive more, better traffic to your careers site in a cost-effective way.

Semantic

Semantic is the understanding and meaning of the interpretation of words and sentence structure. Semantics helps us to determine what is said, and what we mean. It allows us to see how we understand others, and the decisions we make as a result of this insight.

Skills shortage

Skills shortages or talent shortages happen when demand for the skill(s) exceeds supply. This increases competition, creates a candidate-driven market and usually means your time-to-hire and cost-per-hire increases (because recruitment’s harder). 

Employer branding is one of the best ways to counteract skills shortages. 

Social Distribution

Tribepad has the ability to post vacancies directly onto social media sites along with onto career branded websites. This social distribution tool maximises the audience of who will view the vacancies in hope to attract further top talent. If an applicant applies via social media, they will automatically be directed through to the branded applicant management system. The candidate won’t know the difference, but for the recruiters, this provides them with the ability to manage all applications on one simplified platform.

Social Media Websites/Platform

A social media website or platform is Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter for example where individuals sign up to connect with friends, family and colleagues. For recruiters however, this is a way of gaining a further insight into a candidate’s personal life, building an in-depth profile on a candidate.

Social recruiting

Social recruiting (or social hiring, social media recruiting) is the process of attracting and sourcing candidates using social media. 

At its best, social recruitment is much more than just distributing jobs on social platforms. Social recruiting empowers you to reach passive candidates by showcasing your culture and building your employer brand.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service also known as SaaS, is a way for online companies to provide products and services to the consumer. In this case, Tribepad SaaS recruitment software provides employers with a platform to locate, attract, manage and find the perfect candidate for a position within a company. It is a software solution designed only for delivery via the Internet.

Source of hire

Source of hire is an important recruitment metric that tells you where your new hires came from. Understanding source of hire helps you make smarter future decisions about where to allocate time and resources for better recruitment ROI in the future. 

Sourcing

Sourcing refers to actively identifying and contacting prospective candidates, usually through job boards, social media, and your candidate database

In contrast to attraction, sourcing is an outbound method of recruitment that relies on recruiters to proactively approach candidates. 

Tagging

For a recruiter, to locate specific candidate profiles out of thousands can be like finding a needle in a haystack. With Applicant Tracking Software, the recruiter has the ability to assign keywords, or ‘tag’, each candidate’s profile. This could be anything from a region where a candidate lives, a city, a skill set, a previous job position or even their qualifications. This makes the recruitment process linear, locating the right talent in seconds by searching for these specific ‘tags’. As a result this decreases the amount of time it takes to hire the right candidate for the vacancy and saves agency costs by having talent ready at your fingertips.

By tagging candidates’ profiles, applicants are then placed in talent pools.

Talent Acquisition

Talent acquisition is the process of locating, attracting and engaging with potential candidates in order to attract them to apply for a position. Attracting future employees involves a strong brand image, informative vacancy advertisements and a simple means of applying for a position. Once you have engaged with the talent, it is important to retain them and find them the perfect position. Tribepad’s Applicant Tracking Software allows you to track and monitor candidates throughout the recruitment process.

Talent Attraction

Talent attraction involves doing something of critical importance to entice the right talent to apply for a job. Talent attraction can be achieved through a variety of recruitment efforts including social media interaction, job board posting, networking events and brand advertising. It is important as a recruiter to attract the right talent, which can be achieved through ensuring that the company is transparent; demonstrating the company’s culture, ethics and motivations plus sharing alternative information including employee testimonials. Attracting high quality talent, not only ensures that you will fill the vacancy with the right candidate, but also improves the likeliness of that employee remaining with the company. In the long-term this will save money on employee training and recruitment efforts.

Talent competitors

Your talent competitors are the other organisations competing with you for candidates. They might include like-for-like organisations in the same industry or come from different industries altogether. 

You might even consider broader sources of competition – like remaining a stay-at-home parent versus returning to the workforce.

Talent pool

A talent pool is a collection of prospective candidates grouped by similar characteristics. You might build a talent pool of customer service assistants, for example, or nurses in the Northeast.  

Talent pooling is a proactive recruitment strategy that relies on attracting then nurturing candidates. It gives you a ready-to-go pool of talent to call as soon as a role opens. 

Talent Pooling

When a candidate applies for a job through an Applicant Tracking System, they create a profile by either manually entering their details or by parsing a CV or social media profile. In order to keep track of each candidate and to locate them easily, a recruiter can tag a candidate. A keyword can be assigned to the profile which helps to categorise and summarise a profile i.e. by title (project manager), region (Yorkshire), or qualification (PRINCE2) to name a few, or a combination of all three, or more. A candidate that is tagged with the same keyword goes into a specific talent pool. This is called talent pooling and makes it easier for the recruiter to locate the right talent for the right job, by searching these talent pools, then engaging with them and sending them vacancies.

Ticket System (Support Tickets)

The ticket system enables the Tribepad support team to view any issues raised by clients, and address them accordingly. It allows for clients to view the issues and track the progress of the ticket. This keeps both Tribepad and our clients up-to-date.

Time-to-fill

Closely related to time-to-hire, time-to-fill is a recruitment metric that tells you how long it takes to hire from opening a requisition to having a signed contract.

Time-to-fill is an organisation-centric metric that tells you how long it takes to hire. It’s useful for understanding the efficiency of the end-to-end recruitment process and identify future improvements to your recruitment strategy

Time-to-hire

Closely related to time-to-fill, time-to-hire is a recruitment metric that tells you how long it takes to hire someone from when they complete an application through to signing a contract. 

Time-to-hire focusses on the speed of the recruitment process from a candidate’s perspective, measuring how efficiently you moved that individual through the recruitment funnel. Time-to-hire is a critical part of the candidate experience. (Read more about accelerating time-to-hire). 

Time-to-offer

Alongside time-to-hire, some organisations use the recruitment metric time-to-offer, which measures how long it takes a candidate to receive an offer once they complete an application. 

It’s a candidate-centric metric helpful for illuminating the candidate experience but without accounting for time in onboarding and compliance. Good recruitment software will give you a breakdown of time spent within each stage of your recruitment process

Turnover

Employee turnover refers to the proportion of employees who leave your organisation during a specific time period (usually a year). Good recruitment contributes to lower turnover because you’re hiring higher quality, better fit people who stay longer.

In particular, early turnover – where new hires leave in under 12-months – points to a problem with recruitment or onboarding

Unconscious bias

Unconscious bias refers to the unconscious mental processes that cause someone to display bias or act unfairly, counter to their conscious value system. 

Unconscious bias is a major hurdle to building a fair, inclusive recruitment process and ultimately an inclusive, diverse workforce that’s better for everyone. (Read about removing unconscious bias). 

User experience (UX)

UX refers to the experience users have when interacting with a product or service. 

UX is super important to choosing the right recruitment software, because software everyone hates won’t get used. Good talent tech should have an intuitive, modern, streamlined interface that makes life easy for hiring managers, recruiters, and candidates

User Experience (UX)

It is important that as a recruiter you understand the experience that your candidates go through as they move through the application process. The user experience starts with the initial viewing of the vacancy, posting all the way through to the acceptance of the contract for the role within the company. The application must be a seamless process, in order to avoid losing candidates during. For example, if whilst creating a candidate profile requires an amount of effort, the candidate is more than likely to get frustrated and not complete their application.

By implementing an Applicant Tracking System (recruitment system), you are managing the entire process that the candidate experiences. As a recruiter, you decide the way in which and how many questions are asked or how many fields need to be completed in order to create a profile, for example. It would be recommended to request feedback from candidates on their experience during the recruitment process.

Video Interviewing

A video interview is a job interview that happens remotely, using video interviewing technology. Video interviews can be pre-recorded one-way interviews – often used to replace phone screening – or two-way live interviews. 

Video interviewing accelerates time-to-hire and can improve inclusion by supporting candidates to interview anytime, anywhere, through accessible software. 

Video Interviewing (VI)

A video interview is a job interview that happens remotely, using video interviewing technology. Video interviews can be pre-recorded one-way interviews – often used to replace phone screening – or two-way live interviews. 

Video interviewing accelerates time-to-hire and can improve inclusion by supporting candidates to interview anytime, anywhere, through accessible software. 

Volume recruitment

Volume recruitment, or high-volume recruitment, means you recruit for a high number of roles or get a high number of applicants to each role. Typically these are entry-level roles with a lower barrier to entry, like customer service representatives. 

You know about it, if you’re a high volume recruiter. For example, during COVID Tesco processed one million applications within three days and hired 45,000 people.  

If you recruit at volume, recruitment automation is mission-critical.

It looks like you're using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser for the best experience.