Verifying a candidate’s history before they start, such as previous employment, education, credentials or criminal record. What may be checked, and when, is regulated differently in each country, so checks should be role appropriate rather than blanket.
How candidates perceive and feel about your hiring process, from application through to rejection or offer. Every candidate is a potential customer, employee or reviewer, so a slow or silent process has a real commercial cost.
Everyone currently moving through the hiring process for a role, at every stage from first contact to offer. A healthy pipeline is the difference between hiring from choice and hiring from desperation.
In HarmoniHRM: Recruit manages the full pipeline, and pipeline candidates for open roles are visible directly on the Organo chart.
Someone who works for a company without being an employee: contractors, freelancers, agency staff and consultants. They offer flexibility, but misclassifying what is really an employee as a contractor is a serious legal risk in most countries.
Reviewing applications against the role’s requirements to decide who moves forward. At any real volume it is the biggest time sink in recruitment, which is why it is increasingly software assisted rather than done line by line.
In HarmoniHRM: Recruit assesses every CV against the role with a fit score, the strongest signals and the areas to probe at interview.
The deal a company offers its people: what they get, from pay and growth to purpose and flexibility, in exchange for what they give. A clear EVP makes hiring messages consistent and honest instead of improvised per vacancy.
How a company presents itself, on purpose, to the people it wants to attract and hire. It is built from real employee experience: review sites and referral conversations will expose any gap between the pitch and the reality.
A company that legally employs people on your behalf in countries where you have no entity, handling payroll, tax and local compliance while the person works day to day for you. It is the fast route into a new country, traded off against per employee fees and less direct control over employment terms.
Recruiting senior or hard to fill roles by approaching people directly, usually through a specialist firm, also called headhunting. Fees commonly run to a substantial share of first year pay, so it is reserved for the roles that matter most.
The manager the new hire will actually work for, and the person who owns the hiring decision. Recruiters run the process; hiring managers own the outcome, which is why their engagement predicts hiring quality.
Filling roles with existing employees through promotions and transfers rather than external hires. It is usually faster and cheaper, and it signals that careers can progress without leaving.
In HarmoniHRM: Employee Management tracks transfers and promotions as Journeys, updating role, reporting line and pay band in one place.
The document that defines a role: its purpose, responsibilities, required skills and experience, and how success will be judged. A sharp JD improves everything downstream, from the advert to the interview questions to the first performance review, because everyone is measuring against the same definition.
In HarmoniHRM: In Recruit, the optional HARMONI AI add-on drafts the job description from a short brief, for the hiring team to refine before the role is posted.
The formal document laying out the terms of employment a candidate is being offered: role, pay, start date and conditions. It usually precedes the full contract and sets the tone for the whole relationship.
In HarmoniHRM: In Recruit, an accepted offer creates the employee record, payroll profile and onboarding tasks automatically.
Someone who is not actively job hunting but might move for the right opportunity. Reaching them takes sourcing and a compelling story rather than a job board post, and they often turn out to be the strongest hires.
A test taken during hiring to measure skills, aptitude or working style, from coding exercises to situational judgement tests. Used well they add real signal; used carelessly they add friction and can introduce bias.
A scheme that rewards employees for introducing candidates who get hired. Referred hires tend to arrive faster and stay longer, which is why many companies pay meaningful bonuses for them.
A formal, approved request to fill a role, and the starting point of most hiring processes. It forces the useful questions early: what the role is, what it pays, who approves it and why it is needed now.
In HarmoniHRM: Recruit tracks each open position from requisition through to offer, with unlimited recruiters and hiring managers on one flat company price.
Proactively finding and reaching out to potential candidates rather than waiting for applications to arrive. It is essential for senior, niche or competitive roles where the best people are rarely browsing job boards.
An interview where every candidate is asked the same planned questions and scored against the same criteria. It feels less natural than a freewheeling chat, and it is considerably better at predicting actual job performance.
The strategic version of recruitment: not just filling today’s vacancy, but building the pipelines, employer brand and hiring processes for the roles a company will need next. Recruitment fills a role; talent acquisition builds the machine that fills roles.
A group of people a company has identified as strong potential hires for current or future roles, including past applicants and near miss candidates. Warm pools make future searches faster and cheaper than starting cold every time.
Every section of the glossary, in plain English. Back to the full glossary →