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Explore SolutionsWhether you’re new to recruitment marketing or you’ve been at it for decades, there always seems to be new jargon and trends that make up your daily conversations. Sometimes it can be hard to keep up.
What’s the difference between a job description and a job posting? Did I hear that recruiter right when they said they were looking for a purple squirrel?
We’re taking matters into our own hands to make your job a little easier. We compiled all of those words that you hear in your recruitment marketing meetings and defined them below:
A B C D E F G H I J M O P Q R S T U V
| Term | Definition |
| A | |
| accessibility | Accessibility is the practice of making your career site usable by as many people as possible. This provides equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities. |
| active candidate | Someone who is actively searching for job opportunities. |
| applicant flow | Flow refers to the volume of applicants per job opening. |
| Applicant Tracking System (ATS) | A tool that manages the application process on all of your job openings. It keeps track of applicants and where they are in the hiring process. |
| B | |
| Baby boomers | The generation generally defined as people born from 1946 to 1964, during the post–World War II baby boom. |
| Boolean search | Boolean search allows recruiters to combine keywords with modifiers such as AND, NOT, and OR to narrow down the most relevant search results when sourcing candidates. |
| C | |
| candidate engagement | Communicating with job seekers during the recruitment process. |
| candidate experience | How job seekers feel about an employer’s recruitment and hiring processes. |
| candidate ghosting | When a candidate suddenly stops responding to a recruiter without explanation. |
| candidate journey | Every point in which a candidate interacts with your brand throughout the job search process, from branded ads to the application to the interview to hire. |
| candidate persona | Candidate personas help you better understand your audience and attract more candidates through targeted messaging and branding. It’s “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal job candidate.” A candidate persona will help with creating strategies for all of the tips we have discussed. It will give you insights into what shared interests you should be attracting candidates with, how best to customize your content, what details your candidates will find important, and what values will resonate with them the most. |
| candidate relationship management (CRM) | Derived from a customer relationship management system, a CRM keeps track of communications with your talent pool and candidates. This tool is great for building relationships with passive talent. |
| career fair | A recruiting event where job seekers come to meet potential employers and recruiters to learn more about their job openings. |
| careers site | An employment website where companies can post their job openings, share their company culture, and any other information that may be useful for job seekers. |
| content management system (CMS) | A platform that recruitment marketing teams use to collaborate, create, edit, and share employer branding content. |
| content marketing | A recruitment marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract and retain passive and active job applicants. |
| D | |
| diversity, equity & inclusion (DE&I) | Diversity reflects all of the differences that make up people including race, ethnicity, gender, age, national origin, religion, disability, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, education, marital status, language, and physical appearance. Equity is the fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all people. Inclusion is the act of creating environments in which any individual or group can exist and feel welcomed, respected, supported, and valued to fully participate. |
| E | |
| employee ambassador | An employee who promotes your employer brand and job opportunities to their network. |
| Employee Generated Content (EGC) | Employee Generated Content (EGC) is any content such as photos, videos, or graphics created and shared by employees. EGC is useful for recruitment marketers because it is a more authentic way to promote the brand. Recruitment marketers can repurpose the content on official brand platforms. |
| employee referral | When an employee knows someone in their network who is interested for a job at their company, they reach out to the recruiter or hiring manager to recommend their connection. |
| Employee Referral Program (ERP) | When an employer incentivizes employees to make referrals for their job openings. |
| employee retention | Retention refers to how long employees stay at a company after they are hired. Once employees are hired, it is equally important for companies to have a strategy to keep them interested in remaining employees. |
| Employee Value Proposition (EVP) | The defining statement of how a company identifies as an employer, and communicates the mutual offers made by both employer and employee; namely, the value employees can expect to receive from the organization, as well as the value they are expected to contribute. |
| employer brand | A company’s external reputation as a workplace, whether intentional or not. Through messaging, marketing, and advertising, the employer brand establishes the positioning of the company not only to existing employees, but publicly to active and passive candidates and other key stakeholders within talent attraction. |
| employer reputation management | Monitoring employee and job seeker sentiment as it relates to your employer brand. This can be through reviews, ratings, social media, and other means. |
| Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) | Laws that prohibit specific types of job discrimination in certain workplaces. This includes age, disability, ethnicity, nation of origin, gender, sexual orientation, and more. The U.S. Department of Labor deals with EEO monitoring and enforcement. |
| F | |
| functional resume | A resume format that primarily showcases a candidate’s skills, as opposed to a reverse-chronological resume that organizes a candidate’s experience in order of recency. The functional resume allows employers to focus on the candidate’s qualifications such as any technical or soft skills required for the job. |
| G | |
| Generation X | The demographic cohort following the baby boomers and preceding the millennials, generally defined as people born from 1965 to 1980. (aka Gen X.) |
| Generation Y | The demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z, generally defined as people born from 1981 to 1996. (aka Millennials or Gen Y.) |
| Generation Z | The demographic cohort succeeding Millennials and preceding Generation Alpha, generally defined as people born from the mid-to-late 1990s to the early 2010s. (aka Gen Z or Zoomers) |
| gig economy | Companies hire temporary workers, independent contractors, and freelancers instead of full-time employees. |
| H | |
| hiring manager | Leaders from the hiring department who are responsible for hiring an employee, and often serve as the new hire’s future supervisor. |
| HR Tech Stack | A collection of integrated digital tools that support the HR business function. The tools in an HR tech stack can handle traditional, transactional tasks (such as payroll and benefits administration), freeing HR professionals up to focus on more strategic efforts. |
| I | |
| inbound recruiting | Creates a candidate experience through employer brand content and marketing strategies that help companies build relationships with top talent. By taking an inbound marketing approach to recruiting, companies can connect with passive and active job seekers, engage with their network, and delight candidates throughout the application process. |
| J | |
| job advert | An announcement that informs job seekers that a certain position is open. It informs about the job responsibilities, company culture, benefits, and more. |
| job advertising | Using paid methods to get open job opportunities in front of job seekers. |
| job aggregator | Similar to a search engine, an aggregator crawls hundreds, if not thousands of sites, to find open job listings, and display them in query results, using an algorithm to determine which appear first. |
| job board | Posts open positions on behalf of companies who come to them looking to advertise jobs online. |
| job description | The on-file document for each job in an organization that aids in compliance. It defines work standards, responsibilities, compensation, and possibilities for advancement in great detail. |
| job distribution | Companies can save time by setting rules around the automatic distribution of their openings to job boards or social pages. |
| job hopper | Someone who moves from job to job every year or two, rather than staying with a team for the long-term. |
| job posting | An announcement on your career site about an open position at your company. They should be relatively short, engaging to read, and include the most essential information about the role. They should also give job seekers a sense of your company’s mission and culture. |
| job search engine | See job aggregator. |
| M | |
| Military Skills Translator Tool | A tool embedded in your career site that allows military veterans to search for jobs that match their transferrable skills. The tool converts MOS/AFSC/Ratings codes to the corresponding civilian occupations. |
| Millennials | See Generation Y. |
| O | |
| onboarding | When a new employee starts with a company, onboarding is the training they go through to learn the ins and outs of the company and their new role. |
| outbound recruiting | Actively searching for candidates for a job and contacting them directly to invite them to interview. (i.e., sourcing.) |
| P | |
| passive candidate | Someone who is not looking for a job right now, but would be open to an offer if it was the right opportunity. |
| pipelining | Identifying and keeping track of candidates who you may want to recruit in the future. For example, if you have to hire new technologists every few months, you might make a pipeline to start with each time you have a new opening. |
| post and pray | A passive form of recruiting where companies post the job to their career site and conduct no extra advertising to attract candidates. This is the opposite of recruitment marketing. |
| programmatic job advertising | An automated way to distribute jobs to a network of job boards with a set of rules and parameters. |
| purple squirrel | A perfect job candidate who meets every single one of the job requirements. Hint: They tend not to exist. |
| Q | |
| quality applicant | A quality applicant is someone who applies to your job and meets enough of your criteria that they make it to the interview stage. They don’t necessarily mean that they’re the best candidate for the job, but their qualifications signify that you reached the right type of person with your recruitment marketing. |
| R | |
| recruiter | Someone who searches for qualified candidates for a job opening, facilitates the needs of the hiring manager, and creates the candidate experience throughout the hiring process. |
| recruitment marketing | Marketing that supports recruitment efforts. Includes job ads, job boards and aggregators, career sites, content marketing, social media, search engines, programmatic ads, recruitment events, traditional marketing, and more. |
| recruitment marketing automation | Automation aims to make all recruitment marketing processes and responsibilities easier to manage. Some examples include job distribution, programmatic job advertising, and more. |
| S | |
| screening | The process of reviewing job candidates before their interview with the hiring manager. Screening includes reviewing applications, resumes, and sometimes an initial discussion with a recruiter. |
| seasonal recruiting | Recruiting an increased volume of temporary workers for specific times of the year such as the winter holidays or summer. |
| SEO keywords | Words used in your job descriptions made up of the most likely searched terms by candidates, such as job titles, targeted skills, certifications, and responsibilities. |
| skills gap | The difference between the skills employers are seeking in candidates and the skills that available talent actually have. |
| social recruiting | Using social media networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram to attract and source talent. |
| sourcer | Supports a recruiter by digging deeper into a candidate profile and searching for passive talent in the target market. |
| staffing | The hiring of an agency to provide temporary workers (rather than full-time employees). |
| T | |
| talent community | An online space/platform that allows candidates to communicate and connect with each other. Normally moderated by the employer. |
| talent network | A database of candidate contact information (e.g., Name, Phone, Email and Interests) that an employer utilizes to send personalized messages and job opportunities. |
| talent pool | A database of potential job candidates. |
| touchpoint | All of the times a candidate or potential candidate interacts with your brand throughout the recruitment process. |
| U | |
| unicorn | Unicorn job descriptions often include overly-specific skill sets or unclear job requirements that can exclude or discourage perfectly qualified applicants. Even if these job reqs are written in good faith, it’s better to just get real. |
| V | |
| virtual recruiting | When the hiring process takes place entirely remotely, without meeting the candidates face to face. This can occur through phone or video interviews while coordinating through chat and email. A candidate’s location is no longer a barrier with virtual recruiting. |
What other words would you like to see added to our recruitment marketing glossary? Let us know!
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