Recruitment terms explained

RPO stands for Recruitment Process Outsourcing: you place your hiring process with one external partner on a structural basis. That partner runs the full funnel, from employer branding and campaigns to sourcing, screening and follow-up, under your own name. You pay for the process, not per placement.

Read on: what RPO is and who it works for.

Contingency recruitment, in the Netherlands called werving en selectie, means hiring an external agency for one vacancy. The agency searches, screens and presents candidates, and you pay a fee per placement, usually a percentage of the annual salary. It is a transaction, not an ongoing partnership.

Read on: how contingency recruitment compares with RPO.

In a secondment you hire a professional who is and stays employed by the secondment firm. You pay an hourly rate for as long as the assignment runs. Secondment suits temporary or specialist capacity: the expertise arrives quickly, but it leaves again when the assignment ends.

Read on: how secondment compares with RPO.

Temporary staffing means hiring people through a staffing agency that is the legal employer and pays their wages. You pay an hourly rate including a margin. Staffing is meant for flexible, often short-term work, whereas secondment usually covers longer assignments with specialist profiles.

Read on: how staffing agencies compare with RPO.

Executive search is the targeted search for candidates for board and senior management roles. The searcher maps the market, approaches suitable leaders personally and discreetly, and qualifies them in depth. The audience is small and almost never actively looking, so posting a vacancy rarely works here.

Read on: how management and executive roles are filled.

Headhunting means approaching someone who already has a job directly, to interest them in your role. In practice the word is often used as a synonym for executive search, although headhunting strictly refers to the approach method and executive search to the whole assignment.

Read on: how senior hiring works in practice.

An interim recruiter is a temporary recruitment professional you hire to add capacity to your existing hiring process. They work with your budget, your systems and your channels. What you buy is an extra pair of hands, not a new recruitment system.

Read on: how an interim recruiter compares with RPO.

No cure, no pay is a fee arrangement in which you only pay an agency once someone is actually hired. It feels risk free, but the agency only earns on a placement, so its incentive is speed and volume rather than the best possible match.

Read on: what no cure, no pay really costs.

Talent acquisition covers everything involved in attracting, selecting and retaining people, including the strategy behind it. Where recruitment often refers to filling an open vacancy, talent acquisition looks ahead: which people will the organisation need over the coming years?

Read on: the ways to organise recruitment.

A recruitment strategy is the plan behind your hiring: which audience you are after, where they are, what moves them, and which message, channels and funnel will bring them in. Without one, every campaign is a gamble and you cannot explain afterwards why it worked.

Read on: how a recruitment strategy is built.

A labour market analysis maps how many people with a given profile exist in a region, where they currently work, what competitors offer and how scarce the audience really is. It is the factual basis under a recruitment strategy: measure first, choose channels second.

Read on: why analysis comes before campaigns.

Employer branding is the work of building your reputation as an employer: what sets your organisation apart, why people want to work there and how you show that consistently. It works over the long term and shapes whether candidates respond at all, before they read your vacancy.

Read on: what employer branding delivers.

The employer value proposition, or EVP, is the promise you make as an employer: what an employee gets from you and what you ask in return. It is the foundation under employer branding. An EVP that does not match daily reality turns against you at the first resignation.

Read on: what an employer value proposition is and how to build one.

Recruitment communications covers everything an organisation says to current and future employees: job adverts, campaigns, the careers site and social content. The term comes from the communications world and overlaps heavily with recruitment marketing, which reasons more from audience, media and conversion.

Read on: what recruitment marketing involves.

Recruitment marketing is the combination of audience strategy, employer content, paid media and application funnels that employers use to reach and activate the right candidates. It borrows the logic of commercial marketing: work out who you want and what moves them before choosing channel and message.

Read on: how recruitment marketing is applied.

Job marketing is the active promotion of vacancies through targeted campaigns on social media, search engines and job platforms, so you also reach people who are not searching themselves. It is the narrower sibling of recruitment marketing: job marketing is about the vacancy, recruitment marketing about the audience.

Read on: how job marketing works.

A recruitment campaign is a bounded, usually paid campaign that drives candidates towards one or more vacancies, with its own audience, budget, run time and message. Unlike employer branding it is short lived and directly measurable: you can see per channel what it delivers in applications.

Read on: how vacancy campaigns are set up.

Social recruitment means hiring through social media: being visible to candidates on channels such as LinkedIn, Meta and TikTok through targeted campaigns and content, including people who are not actively looking. The channel should follow from the audience, never the other way round.

Read on: how social recruitment is used.

In recruitment, sourcing means finding and approaching possible candidates yourself instead of waiting for someone to reply to a job advert. Note the confusion: outside recruitment, sourcing means procurement, finding and contracting suppliers, and that meaning fills a large part of the search results. Within recruitment the word is often used as shorthand for active sourcing, although sourcing strictly refers to finding profiles and active sourcing to the whole run of finding, approaching and qualifying them. So sourcing usually names the first step, while active sourcing counts the work that follows it.

Read on: how active sourcing works in practice.

Active sourcing is the targeted searching, approaching and convincing of candidates who are not actively applying. A sourcer maps the audience, approaches profiles personally, usually via LinkedIn, and qualifies whoever responds. Note that sourcing on its own can also mean procurement in a business context.

Read on: when sourcing makes sense.

A job board is a vacancy platform where employers pay to post a role and jobseekers search, such as Indeed or LinkedIn Jobs. Job boards only reach people who are already looking. For common roles that is often enough; for scarce roles it rarely is.

Read on: when job boards are enough.

Referral recruitment means hiring through your own employees: they put forward people from their network, often for a bonus once someone starts. Referred candidates already know the organisation a little, which improves the odds of a good match. The reach is only as wide as your team.

Thought Leader Recruitment (TLR) is the targeted attraction and activation of talent through the authority and visibility of leaders within an organisation. Their content is distributed specifically to the intended audience, inside and outside their own network. Behaviour and interest serve as an intent signal, after which relevant candidates are approached personally. The method was developed by SocialFind.

Read on: how SocialFind applies Thought Leader Recruitment.

Volume recruitment is hiring many people for the same or similar roles at once, for example for a new site or a seasonal peak. It needs a different set-up from individual vacancies: continuous inflow, standardised screening and an application process that can handle large numbers.

Read on: how volume recruitment is set up.

An ATS, or applicant tracking system, is the software in which an organisation records vacancies, applicants and the progress of the hiring process. It stores CVs, sends messages and produces reports. An ATS earns its keep once several vacancies run at the same time, more than two people weigh in on decisions, or you want to see where candidates drop out; with a handful of roles a year and a short shortlist, a shared mailbox and a folder often still do the job. If you do pick one, start from what you already track and from how it connects to your vacancy pages, not from the length of the feature list. Note that outside HR the abbreviation ATS is used for entirely different systems.

Read on: how recruitment operations are set up.

A recruitment CRM is a system for staying in touch with people who are not applying yet: previously rejected candidates, your network and interested followers. Where an ATS manages live applications, a CRM is about building relationships before a vacancy exists.

Read on: how to keep candidate data usable.

AI recruitment is the use of artificial intelligence in the hiring process: writing job adverts, matching and pre-selecting CVs, chatbots in the application funnel and forecasting channel performance. Under the European AI Act, systems that select candidates count as high-risk applications.

The term AI recruiter covers two very different things. Most often it means software: a tool that automates parts of a recruiter's work, such as searching for candidates, running a first conversation by chat or voice, or ranking CVs. It is also used by recruiters who describe themselves that way because they use AI as an aid for search strings, texts and analysis, while doing the conversation and the judgement themselves. The distinction settles who makes the decision, and that is the question that matters: under the European AI Act a system that selects candidates is a high-risk application, with requirements for human oversight and transparency.

Read on: what AI does and does not do in recruitment.

LinkedIn Recruiter is LinkedIn's paid search and outreach platform for recruiters, with broader filters, more profile detail and InMail messages. It is a sourcing tool rather than a job board: you look people up and approach them yourself instead of waiting for applications. There are several tiers, of which Recruiter Lite is the lightest: a narrower search reach, fewer InMails and no shared work across a team. You buy a licence per seat per year, and LinkedIn publishes no fixed price for it, so a figure only comes through a quote; treat any amount you find online as an estimate. It pays for itself when someone sources with it every week, and not when you have a few vacancies a year or reach out only now and then, because a paid LinkedIn campaign or a sourcing partner is usually cheaper than a seat standing idle.

Read on: when sourcing via LinkedIn pays off.

The vacancy intake is the conversation in which employer and recruiter agree what the role involves, which profile is genuinely required, what the organisation offers and how selection will run. A good intake prevents most misunderstandings later and is often the starting point of time to hire.

Read on: how a hiring assignment starts.

The recruitment funnel is the narrowing path of your hiring: from reach and clicks to applications, qualified candidates, interviews, offers and finally a hire. Measuring how many people pass each step shows you where it stalls, instead of only that there are too few hires.

Read on: how to make the funnel measurable.

The application funnel is the part of the recruitment funnel candidates walk through themselves: from advert or vacancy page to form and confirmation. Every extra question, click or login step costs you applicants. For operational roles a short, mobile-friendly application is often decisive.

Read on: how to stop drop-off in the funnel.

Screening is assessing applicants against criteria agreed in advance: does the profile fit, is the motivation genuine, is the person available and are the hard requirements met? The goal is not to pass through as many candidates as possible, but to show clearly who genuinely qualifies.

Read on: how screening and follow-up work.

The candidate journey is the whole route someone travels from first contact with your organisation to the first working day or the rejection: advert, vacancy page, application, interviews, offer and onboarding. Mapping that route shows you where candidates drop out and why.

Read on: where candidates drop out of the funnel.

Candidate experience is how an applicant experiences your process: clarity up front, speed of response, the tone of contact and the way a rejection is delivered. Rejected candidates talk about it too and may apply again later, so it touches your employer reputation directly.

Read on: why candidates drop out.

Passive talent means people who are not looking for work but would move for the right offer. They do not read vacancies and do not respond to adverts. You reach them through visibility in the places they already are and through personal outreach at the right moment.

Read on: how to reach passive talent.

A hire is a completed appointment. In a clean count it only becomes a hire once the candidate has accepted the offer, so people still in the final interview round do not count. Anyone who moves that moment makes their numbers incomparable with everyone else's.

Read on: the full measurement definitions.

An applicant is anyone who responds. A qualified candidate is someone who, after screening, meets the criteria agreed up front. That distinction matters when you judge campaigns: a pile of applicants without quality solves no hiring problem at all.

Read on: how screening makes that distinction.

Time to hire is the lead time of your recruitment. A common definition runs it from the completed vacancy intake to the moment the candidate accepts the offer. Comparison only works if the start and end point are identical for every vacancy, so put that agreement in writing.

Read on: how to reduce time to hire.

Time to fill is the time between opening a vacancy and filling it. The difference with time to hire is the starting point: time to fill counts from the vacancy going live, time to hire usually from the intake or the first contact with the candidate.

Read on: which definitions we hold ourselves to.

Cost per hire is the total cost of one appointment. An honest calculation includes everything attributable to the hiring effort: media budget, content and creative, agency fees, tooling and your own team's hours. A low fee can hide a high real cost per hire.

Read on: how to reduce recruitment costs.

Quality of hire asks whether an appointment turned out to be a good one. You measure it afterwards, for example by whether probation was passed, how the manager rates the person after some months, and turnover in the first year. Without an agreement up front it stays unmeasurable.

Read on: how to steer on data.