HR and recruiting glossary
This glossary defines the terminology used across applicant tracking, AI interviewing, hiring metrics and employment compliance. Each entry opens with a direct definition, then explains how the concept behaves in a real hiring process and where teams most often get it wrong.
Last updated July 2026 · Reviewed by the TalentHive product team
22 terms defined
AI Voice Interview
An AI voice interview is a real-time spoken conversation between a candidate and an AI interviewer that asks role-specific competency questions, adapts with follow-ups, and produces a scored, transcribed result. It replaces the recruiter phone screen and can run for every applicant, around the clock.
Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
An applicant tracking system (ATS) is software that manages hiring end to end: publishing jobs, receiving and parsing applications, moving candidates through pipeline stages, coordinating interviews and feedback, and recording offers. It is the system of record for every hiring decision an organization makes.
Boolean Search
Boolean search is a query technique combining keywords with the operators AND, OR and NOT, plus quotation marks for exact phrases and parentheses for grouping. Recruiters use it to search résumé databases and professional networks with far more precision than plain keyword search.
Candidate Experience
Candidate experience is the sum of every interaction an applicant has with your hiring process — application effort, communication speed, interview quality, and whether they receive a decision. It directly affects offer acceptance, employer reputation, and for consumer businesses, customer sentiment.
Candidate Pipeline
A candidate pipeline is the ordered set of stages every applicant moves through, from application to hire or rejection. Each stage represents a decision point, and stage-to-stage conversion rates reveal precisely where a hiring process loses good candidates.
Candidate Sourcing
Candidate sourcing is the proactive identification and engagement of potential candidates who have not applied to your role. It covers Boolean search on professional networks, talent-pool re-engagement, referrals and outbound outreach, and it feeds the top of the hiring funnel alongside inbound applications.
Cost per Hire
Cost per hire is the total internal and external recruiting spend for a period divided by the number of hires made in it. External costs cover advertising, agency fees and tooling; internal costs cover recruiter and hiring-manager time, which is usually the larger and most often omitted share.
EEOC Compliance
EEOC compliance means US hiring practices must not discriminate on race, colour, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetic information. In practice it requires consistent, job-related selection criteria and documentation sufficient to defend any adverse decision.
Employee Onboarding
Employee onboarding is the structured process of turning an accepted offer into a productive team member: paperwork and compliance, equipment and access provisioning, orientation, role training and early check-ins. It typically spans the first 30 to 90 days.
Employer of Record (EOR)
An employer of record is a third party that legally employs workers on your behalf in a jurisdiction where you have no entity, handling payroll, tax withholding, benefits and local employment compliance. You direct the work day to day; the EOR carries the legal employment relationship.
GDPR Compliance in Recruiting
GDPR compliance in recruiting requires a lawful basis for processing candidate data, transparency about how it is used, defined retention limits, and working rights of access, rectification and erasure. It applies to any employer processing data of candidates in the European Union.
Hiring Funnel
The hiring funnel describes the narrowing progression of candidates from awareness of a role through application, screening, interview, offer and acceptance. Measuring conversion between adjacent stages isolates exactly which step is losing candidates and why.
HRIS (Human Resource Information System)
An HRIS is the system of record for employee data — profiles, compensation, time off, benefits, org structure and documents. It manages people after they are hired, whereas an applicant tracking system manages candidates before they are hired.
Interview Scorecard
An interview scorecard is a predefined set of competencies with rating scales and behavioural anchors that interviewers use to evaluate every candidate identically. It converts subjective impressions into comparable scores and creates the written record that makes hiring decisions defensible.
Knockout Questions
Knockout questions are pass/fail questions asked during the application that filter out candidates who fail a hard requirement — work authorization, licensure, shift availability, location or certification. They remove ineligible applicants before any evaluation effort is spent on them.
Offer Management
Offer management covers everything between selecting a candidate and their first day: compensation approval, offer-letter generation, delivery and signature, negotiation, and acceptance tracking. Delay at this stage is a leading cause of losing candidates you already decided to hire.
Quality of Hire
Quality of hire measures the value a new employee delivers, typically combining ramp-up speed, performance ratings, retention past a defined horizon and hiring-manager satisfaction. It is the outcome metric every other recruiting metric exists to serve.
Recruitment Marketing
Recruitment marketing applies marketing practice to talent attraction: employer brand, careers-site content, job-post copy, distribution channels and conversion measurement. Its objective is a larger and better-matched applicant pool for each open role.
Résumé Parsing
Résumé parsing is the automated extraction of structured data from an unstructured résumé — contact details, work history, education, skills and dates. It converts a PDF or Word file into searchable database fields so candidates can be filtered, ranked and compared consistently.
Structured Interview
A structured interview asks every candidate for a role the same predetermined questions in the same order, and scores answers against a fixed rubric. Decades of selection research find structured interviews substantially more predictive of job performance — and far more legally defensible — than unstructured conversations.
Talent Pool
A talent pool is a maintained database of candidates who are potential future fits — silver-medallists from prior searches, sourced prospects, referrals and past applicants who consented to be retained. It shortens future searches by starting them with warm, pre-qualified candidates.
Time to Hire
Time to hire measures the days between a candidate entering your pipeline and accepting an offer. It reflects the efficiency of your evaluation process. Time to fill, by contrast, counts from when the requisition opens, and so also includes sourcing time.
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