Lever’s Glossary
of Recruiting Terms

You could Google every unfamiliar term that pops up. But we Instead of making you head to Google every time an unfamiliar term pops up, we’re wanted to make making it easy and provide a complete glossary of acronyms, words and phrases that you use. 

A

Active Candidate
Active candidates are those individuals who are actively seeking employment. In comparison to a passive candidate, an active candidate is likely out of work or simply not happy with their current job role. Active candidates are more likely to take phone calls from recruiters, respond to ads, and continue further in the process.

ADA Compliance
ADA stands for Americans with Disabilities Act and refers to a website’s design. To be ADA compliant, a website must ensure that certain standards are met so that all electronic and information technology is accessible to individuals with disabilities.

Analytics
Is an analysis of data. Lever’s Talent Analytics gives you a view of an individual candidate or the entire pool. Visualize your data and make more strategic decisions.

API
API stands for Application Program Interface. It allows two applications to talk to each other. APIs help make LeverTRM even better by offering more features to customers and users.

Active Candidate
Active candidates are those individuals who are actively seeking employment. In comparison to a passive candidate, an active candidate is likely out of work or simply not happy with their current job role. Active candidates are more likely to take phone calls from recruiters, respond to ads, and continue further in the process.

Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
An Applicant Tracking System or ATS is a core piece of software for talent acquisition teams. It streamlines the recruitment process by managing, storing, and keeping track of your company’s job candidates. It serves as a company’s system of record for hiring and centralizes all parts of the recruitment process, including, but not limited to: managing job postings, communicating with candidates, storing resumes and notes, scheduling interviews, collecting interview feedback, and extending offers to candidates. In other words, it makes hiring easier and more efficient

B

Background Checks
A background check, or pre-employment screening, helps organizations verify that a candidate is who they claim to be. They can include employment, education, criminal records, credit history, motor vehicle and license record checks. Lever offers integrations with several background check providers so you can work with who you like seamlessly.

Boolean Search
A Boolean search is an important part of a targeted recruitment strategy. A good Boolean search can help cut through a mass of profiles and help recruiters find the best candidates for an open job. Boolean operators include: and, or, not, parentheses, quotes, and the asterisk, also called “The Wild Card.”

C

Candidate Experience Surveys
Candidate Experience Surveys help talent acquisition teams understand candidates’ perceptions of the interviewing process. Candidate experience is a critical part of employer brand, and important when sourcing or attempting to fill a pipeline. Lever’s Candidate Experience Survey allows you to create a customized survey, automatically send it to candidates, and collect their responses. These types of surveys can help leaders identify teams, departments, or interview stages that have room to improve and track progress over time.

Candidate Nurture Email
Email marketing allows talent teams to engage with candidates on a regular basis throughout the recruitment process and develop game-changing relationships with top talent. This continued contact is called nurturing. Lever’s Talent Nurture helps teams turbocharge their response rates, save time, and reduce costs.

Company Culture
Company culture, or organizational culture, is what makes an organization what it is. It’s a shared system of beliefs and values that show up in how people interact with each other and work together.

Compliance
This refers to recruiting and hiring compliance with government regulations. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) are examples of requirements companies must comply with to ensure their hiring practices don’t discriminate against certain protected classes.

CRM
A CRM, or candidate relationship management system, preserves a talent team’s or recruiter’s relationships with candidates over time in one central place. In a competitive hiring market, employers must need to deepen relationships with talent in order to attract and hire the best. With a recruitment CRM, a recruiter can quickly search their entire talent database and see the complete history of each and every candidate their company has been in touch with. A recruiter can then leverage the in-depth historical picture of a candidate to communicate on a deeper level.

D

Data Warehouse
A data warehouse is a system that stores and organizes data for business intelligence (BI) activities, like analytics. Unlike regular databases, which are optimized to maintain up-to-date data, data warehouses are designed to provide a long-range view of data. Lever’s Data Warehouse Sync makes it easy to import your recruiting metrics into any BI tool.

DEI
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is a term used to describe programs and policies that encourage representation and participation of diverse groups of people. It can include people of different genders, races and ethnicities, abilities and disabilities, religions, cultures, ages, and sexual orientations and people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and skills and expertise. Diverse and inclusive companies make for more innovative, engaged, and happy teams. But diverse teams don’t happen by accident; they happen by design.

E

EEO Surveys
Similar to diversity surveys though not the same, the EEO (equal employment opportunity) survey is an annual compliance survey required for government-contracted companies. It provides a demographic breakdown of the employer’s workforce and requires company employment data be broken down by specific categories.

Engagement
Engagement can refer to two different things – employee engagement or candidate engagement. Employee engagement is the extent to which employees feel passionate about their job and commitment toward the company. Engaged employees are often more productive, and organizations all over strive for high engagement. Candidate engagement on the other hand, refers to the process of interacting with job candidates. It includes everything from a simple acknowledgement of their application being received to the regular interactions during a negotiation. Having a strong engagement strategy is important for strong recruitment.

Experience/Candidate Experience
Candidate experience refers to how candidates feel about their interactions with your company. It can be a critical part of your brand and an important consideration with sourcing and filling your pipeline. Lever’s Candidate Experience Survey allows you to create a customized survey, automatically send it to candidates, and collect their responses.

eSignature
An eSignature is a signature done electronically. It’s a legal way to get content or approval on electronic documents. It can replace handwritten signatures in virtually any process.

H

Headcount
In recruiting, headcount refers to the number of people employed and who need to be hired. Headcount planning is critical for the success for the company, but often one of the weakest capabilities of HR. Lever’s reports can help talent teams be more strategic when it comes to headcount planning.

HRIS
A human resource information system (HRIS), also known as a Human Capital Management system (HCM), is an HR software. It provides a centralized database that stores applicant tracking functions, onboarding, employee demographics, compensation and benefit choices, time-tracking, and so much more. Lever is rated a top HR software that has integrations with all the top HRIS systems so recruiting and employee management is seamless.

HRMS
HRMS stands for human resource management system. It’s the same thing as an HRIS.

I

Internal Mobility
Also referred to as talent mobility and career mobility, internal mobility refers to the movement of employees across roles within an organization. Encouraging internal mobility can boost employee retention and provide a sense of opportunity for an organization’s most significant asset: its people. With an internal job board and internal candidate tracking, Lever’s Internal Mobility streamlines the application process and allows recruiters to provide white-glove treatment for employees interviewing for other roles. It’s also built on top of Lever’s custom-access controls, which allows for granular granting of sensitive information privileges, meaning the hiring team involved will get to see everything they’re supposed to – and nothing more.

Integrations
Integrations are a way to automate and streamline work and create a more seamless experience for users. LeverTRM integrates with more than a hundred other platforms that HR teams use daily, including the major human capital management solutions – Workday, SAP, Oracle, and UKG, so talent acquisition teams can do background and reference checks, assessments, onboarding and more easily.

J

Job Board
A job board is a website or webpage where organizations can promote open positions and job seekers can apply to them. Your job board is often the first interaction candidates have with your company. Lever offers a job board function, Job Suite, but also integrates with several job boards, including LinkedIn, AngelList, and Google.

Job Description
A job description is how recruiters share details of an open role. It’s what prospective candidates look at to decide if they’re going to apply for a position. Lever believes it’s important to go beyond a job description and create impact descriptions, i.e., a more holistic view of the opportunity and expectations. Relying on lists of job responsibilities and requirements, without investing time to woo competitive candidates, puts smaller companies, companies in competitive job markets, and non-profits at a major disadvantage.

Job Management
Job management is the posting of roles on various channels. It is often paired with advertising, i.e., job management & advertising, as talent acquisition teams have to create job alerts for prospective candidates. Job management is a core area of recruiting software.

K

Knockout Questions
Knockout questions are questions recruiters can use to quickly disqualify candidates. They are designed to save hiring teams’ time. Lever’s Advanced Automation Add-on includes knockout question capabilities.

M

Multi-channel Sourcing
Multi-channel sourcing or multichannel sourcing is the process of seeking candidates through a variety of channels, such as job boards and social networks. Using this strategy can help talent teams find quality candidates and can speed up hiring velocity. Lever’s Chrome Extension integrates the best sourcing channels, making sourcing faster and easier.

P

People Ops
People Operations, often referred to as People Ops, is similar to HR. In some organizations, People Ops perform the same duties as a traditional HR team, i.e., securing competitive benefits, guaranteeing accurate payroll, upholding company policies and procedure, and managing employee lifecycle. But they often are more focused on engagement, employee experience, and company culture.

Performance Management
Performance management is a process of supporting employees in accomplishing the strategic objectives of the organization. It involves the ongoing communication that covers expectations, objective setting, goal setting, feedback, and reviews. A good performance management strategy can ensure that your top talent is supported throughout their employee lifecycle and help to attract other quality talent.

R

Recruiting
Recruiting refers to the active sourcing of candidates for potential employment. LeverTRM is modern recruiting software that helps talent teams streamline the hiring process, making recruiting and hiring more efficient and human.

Requisition Management
A job requisition is a formal request to create a new position in a company. It contains all the details for the position, including if it’s full-time or part-time; temporary or permanent. Requisition management is the creation, tracking, and approval of requisitions. Lever has several requisition management features, including Dynamic Requisition Approver, which helps teams ensure that each stakeholder – finance, HR, etc. – is on board with the requisition requested by defining user picklist fields. This cuts down time by having approvals all in one place, removing the need to create multiple approval chains and manage each individual of them.

S

Screening
Screening is the process recruiters apply to narrow down and evaluate the candidate pool. Lever offers an auto-screening feature that lets recruiters more efficiently process a higher volume of inbound applicants. With auto-screening, recruiters can automatically disqualify candidates who don’t meet certain requirements and prioritize cohorts of others. And the automation rules that undergird the new auto-screening feature can also automatically “tag” candidates. This added meta-data helps categorize candidates, enriching your talent database to make it more organized and more easily searchable.

Searchable Talent Database
A searchable talent database can make finding a great candidate quickly easy. Automatically building a database of active and passive candidates can help cut costs and save time when new positions open up. Lever acts as your own company-wide talent database. It allows users to sort by referral or highest scored and makes it easy to follow up with applicants with highly personalized messages.

Sourcing
Sourcing is the process of identifying and building a pipeline of potential candidates. Often the best talent isn’t looking, so talent teams must focus on proactive candidate sourcing to build a strong pipeline of fresh talent. Lever helps teams keep their pipelines up-to-date and organized so candidates can receive the best possible experience.

T

Talent Acquisition Suite
Lever’s Talent Acquisition Suite offers everything talent teams need to build relationships across multiple channels, have complete pipeline coverage from source to hire to rediscovery, and the insights to make strategic decisions.

Talent Analytics
Talent analytics is the analysis of employee data. HR teams are often responsible for collecting it and do so to better understand their employees and talent pool. Lever’s Advanced Analytics layers flexible reporting and analytical tools on top of recruiting data, so talent teams can assess and improve their processes easily.

Talent Pool
Talent pools are networks of prospective employees that talent teams feel could be great candidates for upcoming roles. Nurturing candidates in talent pools allows talent teams to find qualified candidates faster, accelerate hiring, and increase the number of referrals from happy employees.

Targeted Search
A targeted talent search focuses a talent search on the types of candidates recruiters really want. Talent teams can use Boolean terms to create a targeted search. This type of talent sourcing opens teams up to huge swaths of the talent pool that they didn’t have access to before – among both passive candidates, and active candidates who otherwise wouldn’t apply because they don’t know about your company or open opportunities.

TRM
TRM stands for Talent Relationship Management. While it’s a newer term, TRM is similar to one that you likely already know: Customer Relationship Management (CRM). TRM solutions help talent teams in companies develop relationships with candidates and retain the interest of candidates beyond the hiring cycle. A TRM acts as a central database for candidate information, just like an ATS, but this information is generally more complex and may take up multiple forms or fields.

Hire better. Hire faster.