These are the times when recruiting is practiced through various staffing agencies and even taught as professional or full-fledged courses in universities globally.

With global industrialization and technological innovations changing the way recruiters hire employees, anyone who wishes to join the recruitment industry needs to be aware of certain terms that are used on an everyday basis.

You need not be perplexed or caught off-guard every time an HR professional or your hiring manager speaks about attrition rate, nepotism in the workplace, employee retention, Applicant Tracking System, and so on. Recruit CRM is rephrasing 20 such jargon that might be too hard on you in simple words.

Read on for our ultimate jargon buster!

20 Simplified Recruiting Terms That Agency Recruiters Need to Be Aware of

recruiting terms

Here is a guide on some common recruiting terms that can help you understand the world of recruitment better.

1. Talent Pool or Candidate Pipeline

A talent or a candidate pool/pipeline is described as an essential part of any corporate success. Every single business organization requires competent employees who will add value to it.

A way to help achieve this is to take the help of software-supported candidate pools that often target candidates with relevant qualifications required to fill a certain open position. When recruiters create such pools of applicants for different qualifications, they are commonly called talent pools or candidate pipelines.

These are significantly handy when you need to fill in a position immediately when an employee unexpectedly resigns. A talent pool is useful when recruiters need to reduce the cost of advertising on several job platforms.

The term Boolean Search was created by George Boole, a leading computer pioneer, and mathematician. Boolean or Boolean Search is a methodical process of consistent logical thinking and finding various ways of optimizing your search results.

In recruitment, this is especially useful when you’re searching candidate applications for specific skills or qualifications.

If you want to search candidate applications for those with experience as a Marketing Manager in the field of Social Media Marketing, you can use different keywords like ‘Social Media Strategist’, ‘Influencer Outreach Marketing‘, ‘Social Media Specialist’ and so on to optimize and filter your search results.

3. Applicant Tracking System

An Applicant Tracking System is nothing but simply a recruitment software that is used to track and source candidates, manage job applications, helps in resume parsing, and so on. The features available with an ATS differ with the size of the company and the functionalities recruiters or HR professionals are looking for.

As a recruiter, it’s highly significant to look into an ATS properly before investing in it. Successful talent acquisition managers have time and again mentioned how signing up for a free trial helps understand if a particular Applicant Tracking System is suitable for your agency or business.

4. Careers Site & Recruiting Microsites

Recruiting microsites and career sites are completely two different terms. Recruiters often consider them to be synonymous but they’re not.

A recruiting microsite is a way of attracting job seekers and applicants with the help of certain targeted landing pages. It’s different from a careers site on the basis of the fact that it depends on only one particular theme. (You’ll need a landing page builder to create both, though)!

Some common recruiting microsites themes include— background, department, internships, diversity, and so on.

On the other hand, when you scroll down a brand page or a company website, you come across an option called careers at the bottom that effectively talks about the jobs list or the open position at the company.

However, recruiters must remember that a careers page often acts as an amazing branding page for the business too. A good careers site gives out a strong spark, has engaging graphics, contains influential content and much more.

5. Candidate Onboarding

This is the process via which recruiters help new employees come onboard to the new organization that they’re hiring for.

Candidate onboarding, in fact, is one of the most essential tasks that a recruiter or a talent acquisition professional must follow.

During this entire onboarding phase, recruiters make sure that candidates gain essential knowledge, values, critical insights, and behaviors that are required to smoothly fit into their new place of work.

6. KPI Or Key Performance Indicator

If one looks at KPI or Key Performance Indicator in the recruitment context, then the above refers to the time spent by a recruiter to hire a particular candidate since the open job role was posted to a candidate’s start date or offer of employment. KPIs are values used to measure performance against a target.

KPIs are indeed important to measure a company’s long-term growth and strategic insight into this can reveal areas where a recruiter or a recruitment agency can improve upon.

7. Candidate Sourcing

Candidate sourcing is a recruiting term that describes the method of finding both active and passive candidates for a particular role in a company. These candidates particularly are the ones who haven’t applied to any open roles. The information which recruiters generally try to find during candidate sourcing includes their names, relevant work experiences, contact information, educational qualifications, and so on.

Read more: 10 Candidate Sourcing Strategies Recruiters Can Use In 2021

8. PES Or Pre-Employment Screening

Much as underrated as this is for recruiters, HR experts often stress the fact that PES is significant and recruiters don’t really fulfill their job if they don’t run background checks or validate an applicant’s previous employment status.

At the end of the day, if you end up recruiting a candidate with a previous criminal history, it will absolutely not go down well with your clients. The pre-employment screening will reduce your and your recruitment agency’s liability. This is essential in reducing insurance costs and also unnecessary and expensive lawsuits by hiring the wrong candidate. Additionally, leveraging a CRM for insurance can streamline processes, ensuring that all aspects of risk management, including hiring practices, are covered effectively.

9. Headhunting

The term ‘Headhunting’ is often used when recruiters conduct screening and selection processes to fill up senior-level positions at any company or firm. It is also known as Executive Search, and here you won’t be conducting high-volume recruitment.

It is bound to be a more time-taking process than the regular kind of recruitment. You will be spending more time with every candidate to analyze them better as anything less than a perfect candidate won’t be deemed suitable for the position.

Retained search is the model of recruitment where the company themselves approaches a recruiter. The model does not work on a transactional basis, and usually, HR contracts are involved on all sides.

If a company approaches you to conduct retained search for them, they probably want you to fill up the vacancies and open positions at their firm that is of a more senior level. You will get the chance to work very closely with the company’s senior managers, and there is no better opportunity other than this to build a brand value for yourself in the industry.

11. Contingency Recruitment

The contingency recruitment model works on a transactional basis, and no side is bound by a contract legally. Here, you are not approached directly by the company, but instead, you work yourselves first and then approach them later with a proper candidate in hand.

Any model of recruitment demands quality when it comes to the candidates you select. Here, along with quality, you also require speed.

It would help if you were the best at your job and faster than your competitors so you could approach the company before any other recruitment agency does. You will be looking for candidates to fill up junior-level positions in this model of recruitment.

12. Lead Generation

We all know how important it is to find suitable candidates in the recruitment industry. With so many other recruitment agencies competing to fill up the same jobs in the market, you need to find ways to stay two steps ahead of them at all times.

Lead generation can be defined as the method or process that helps you come across more potential candidates. You generate leads through proper marketing of your ideas and content.

You conduct events to attract more future employees and get them interested in your service beforehand. You have to make sure your ideas reach the right kind of people, so whether it is a blog article or job description, you must write them well and highlight the right keywords.

13. Applicant

‘Applicant’ is the term you will most commonly come across daily in the recruitment industry. An applicant applies for something, and in the case of recruitment, they are someone who applies for a job application with their resume/CV ready.

They judge whether the job is suitable for them based on the job description posted by the recruiter. You must highlight the qualifications required to get the least amount of under-qualified candidates. The applicant sees if they meet all the requirements and qualifications required for the job and apply based on that.

14. Quality of Hire

It is defined as the type of candidates you have in your candidate pool. After the screening process, you will be left with candidates that meet the job’s basic requirements, which has a big part in the Quality of Hire. It depends on a lot of factors like the job performance of the candidate, turnover rate, etc. You must conduct quality hiring at all times and make sure that candidates who are technically qualified and culturally fit for the workplace environment get in.

15. Active Or Passive Candidates

Active candidates are those who are actively seeking out a job and are open to all opportunities available. On the other hand, those who are already employed and are not looking for a job but might still be interested in the opportunities mentioned above are called passive candidates.

Passive candidates are sometimes more qualified than the active ones and have more experience in hand. Therefore, they are the ones who are targeted by recruiters when they have to fill up a critical role at any firm or organization.

16. Referral

Referrals provided by the employees who are already present in the company should always be prioritized.

A referral will automatically increase any candidate’s chance at getting selected by the organization, and therefore, they should not be neglected while recruiting.

Often, software like ATS and CRM comes with an in-built system that keeps track of all referrals and helps sort through all the job applications.

17. Screening

Screening is the first step of the recruitment and helps you achieve a candidate pool of better quality. At this level, you get rid of all the applicants that don’t even seem to meet the minimum qualifications of the job and improve your chances at quality hiring. The sorting takes place while keeping qualifications, experience, skills, etc., in mind and helps you move on to the next stage of recruitment.

18. Talent Acquisition

Talent acquisition can be defined as the process recruiters go through when searching, screening, and selecting a candidate. It helps you recruit talented people for any company and create a candidate pool that only consists of the best candidates in the industry.

It is hard to find someone who ticks off all the checkboxes of skill sets required for any position, but all is possible with the proper distribution of time and energy. From sourcing to interviewing to hiring, it involves several steps.

19. Technical Interview

Interviewing your candidates at regular intervals is vital for you to help decide which candidate is better for the position and also helps you keep track of their progress.

Through these interviews, you help them prepare for the final interview with the company and also help them realize their weaknesses and strengths that they can work on before you make the final choice.

Technical interviews are conducted solely to assess the candidate’s technical skills and abilities and how proficient they are at any task. The questions are designed in a way that helps you analyze which candidate approaches a problem at hand in which way.

20. Candidate Relationship Management (CRM)

A Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) software helps collect data for the candidate you have in your talent pool and helps you maintain all the documents and crucial information related to them in an orderly manner. It keeps track of the interactions you have had with your candidates and helps you access any information related to them that is relevant to the recruiting and hiring process at any time.

It makes recruiting less hassling and more efficient. Every other recruitment agency uses CRMs as they help your business achieve newer heights.

Now that you have a fair amount of knowledge in the basics of recruitment, apply this to understand your hiring metrics better and to drive better results for your agency or search firm.

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