Glossary

What is |?

Definitions of anything and everything related HR and
hiring simplified for you.

Automated Interview Scheduling

Scheduling interviews without human intervention to minimise back and forth between the hiring manager, candidate, and the recruiter is called Automated Interview Scheduling.

This allows the recruitment team to view upcoming interviews in real-time allowing them to spend more time sourcing and engaging with candidates.

Benefits of Automated Interview Scheduling:

  • Reduces the number of emails and calls, freeing up valuable time of recruiters.
  • Frees up recruiters to guide candidates into the hiring process, resulting in better candidate experience.
  • Makes the whole interview scheduling process more transparent.

Benchmark Job

What is a Benchmark Job?

A Benchmark job is a position if in which if all other constraints remaining equal, can be used as a standard to evaluate pay and other comparisons.

How is the Benchmark Job evaluated?

To determine a benchmark job, salary surveys are conducted on relevant groups to assess the given job’s median salary. This median salary helps determine the ‘salary grade’ of the position as it is put along with the grade midpoint of the median salary obtained from the survey.

Non-benchmark jobs are those positions for which reliable salary data is not available. These can be jobs unique to an organization for which the responsibilities and duties can’t be clearly matched with any other positions in the survey.

How are Benchmark jobs useful?

Benchmarking jobs is useful for both recruiters as well as candidates. Recruiters look at it to check an employee’s level of responsibility and salary comparison. On the other hand, employees or candidates can use it to negotiate for a salary hike or change in responsibilities.

CV Parsing

What is CV Parser?

CV Parsing, formally speaking, is the conversion of a free-form CV/resume document into structured information — suitable for storage, reporting, and manipulation by a computer.

CV parsers analyze a resume, extract the desired information, and insert the information into a database with a unique entry for each candidate. Once the resume has been analyzed, a recruiter can search the database for keywords and phrases and get a list of relevant candidates.

    Benefits of CV Parsing:
  • Processes various file formats
  • Deciphers complex resumes
  • Saves recruiters time and improves efficiency in recruitment
  • Processes every resume ensuring that the best candidates are not missed out
  • Improved accuracy of information extraction
  • Auto-fill of application forms resulting in improved candidate experience

    • Chatbot Screening

    What is Chatbot Screening

    Modern AI-enabled software can often automate the pre-screening process via chatbots. This removes human intervention from the pre-screening process increasing the efficiency of the recruitment process and providing a superior candidate experience. Many chatbots come with configurable questions that can be customized to ask different sets of questions depending on role type, industry, domain, etc.

    Benefits of Chatbot Screening

  • Discover ‘information beyond resumes.’ (ex: notice period, intent to relocate, salary expectations, etc).
  • Information collected by the chatbot is used to keep the candidate database updated.
  • Candidates can fill in their response from anywhere
  • Improved ration candidate response

    • Candidate Experience

    What is the Candidate Experience?

    Candidate experience is defined as the perception a candidate has about the company once he or she has entered the recruitment process. Candidate experience is important as past candidates can influence future potential talents. Candidate experience also greatly effects the employer branding of an organization which in turn affects the future candidate prospects.

    Candidate experience includes the following touchpoints:

  • Job search: Includes the social media post, Job description, recruitment agencies, and the company’s career page.
  • Application process: Filling and submission of forms and resumes
  • Feedback: Communication of the status of the applications once the candidate has applied for the job.
  • Interview: Structure, number of rounds, timings, and relevance of interviews.
  • Onboarding: Getting in touch with the team, roles and responsibilities, paperwork, and legal formalities.

    • Candidate Ghosting

    What is candidate ghosting?

    Whenever the candidate or the recruiter suddenly stops communicating midway through the hiring process, it is an incident of Ghosting. In a recent study by Indeed, 83% of recruiters said candidates had ghosted them. Sixty-nine percent of them said ghosting has become increasingly commonplace in the past few years.

    What consists of candidate ghosting?

    Not responding to follow up interview calls
    Not showing up for an in-person interview
    Accepting a job offer, but not showing up on day one
    Consistently putting forth low-quality work before balking
    Quitting a job with no notice

    Know more about how employers can avoid ghosting

    Diversity Hiring

    What is Diversity Hiring?

    Contrary to popular belief, diversity hiring simply means selecting candidates on the basis of merit. Diversity Hiring ensures that the recruitment process is free from any biases pertaining to the candidate’s age, race, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other personal characteristics that don’t affect their performance in the workplace.

    Benefits of Diversity Hiring

  • Hire the most meritorious candidates
  • Rich company culture
  • Wide range of skills
  • Improved employer branding
    Enhanced creativity in the organization

    • Best practices for diversity hiring:

  • Hide personally identifiable information from resumes
  • Diversity audit on the current hiring process
  • Provide inclusive and flexible work-related policies
  • Figure out metrics to track diversity

    • Employee Engagement

    What is Employee Engagement?

    Employee engagement is a metric that determines the measure of an employee’s commitment to his role and the organization he is working for.

    Employee engagement is directly related to performance, and this is where it differs from employee satisfaction, which only indicates how happy employees are. Engaged employees view the company as a whole and understand their role in it. This in return leads to better decision-making.

    How is Employee Engagement Measured?

    There are three major ways an organization can measure employee engagement:

  • Via an employee engagement survey provider
  • Organization measuring it themselves
  • Hybrid approach – annual surveys are done by external agencies, but employee engagement measured throughout the year by the organization.

    • Any of the above methods would require compiling surveys with the relevant questions, and taking employees from every level into consideration.

    Full Life Cycle Recruiting

    What is Full Life Cycle Recruiting?

    Full Life Cycle Recruiting is a term used to describe the end-to-end processes of recruitment including – Identifying hiring gaps, JD posting, Sourcing, Screening, Interviewing, Selection, and Onboarding.

    Also knows as – Life cycle recruitment, 360 recruitment, Recruitment life cycle, or Full cycle recruitment; it basically defines the process a company follows to discover, engage, and hire a candidate.

    Group Interviews

    What is Group Interviews?

    Any interview with an involvement of more than two people at one time, is a group interview. Instances include a single candidate being interviewed by a panel, many candidates being interviewed by a single person, or a group of candidates being interviewed by a panel.

    Advantages of group interviews:

  • It saves time
  • Allows instant comparison of candidates
  • More suitable to hire ‘alpha leaders’

    • Disadvantages of group interviews:

  • Reduces the time given to each candidate
  • Less scope of knowing details about a candidate
  • Not suitable for all personality types

    • Hiring

    What is Hiring?

    The hiring process includes sourcing, engaging, interviewing, and finally selecting an employee for an organization.

    Here are the steps included in the hiring process:

  • Identifying the open roles
  • Creating and posting the JDs
  • Sourcing candidates
  • Pre-screening candidates
  • Screening candidates
  • Setting up interviews
  • Interviews
  • Final selection
  • On-boarding
  • Candidate feedback

    • Internal recruitment

    What is Internal recruitment?

    The process of filling the open positions in an organization through the existing employees is called Internal recruitment. Companies use internal recruitment to fill positions that require an insider’s knowledge of affairs.

    Advantages of Internal recruitment:

  • Saves time and money
  • Increases employee loyalty and retention
  • Encourages upskilling
  • No training costs or time

    • Types of internal recruitment:

  • Promotion
  • Transfer
  • Permanent additional
    responsibilities
  • Temporary responsibilities

    • Job Description

    What is a Job Description?

    A job description is a written description of the main duties and responsibilities related to an open position.

    A job description contains details about the reporting manager, skills and experience required, tools and technologies used in the role, type of role, company culture, salary range, and other tangible and intangible requirements for the opening.

    Importance of Job description

    A job description informs the potential candidates about the duties and helps them understand if they are suited to the role and organization. It also works as a primary filtering tool for the recruiting team while screening candidates. The HR team often uses JDs to streamline the selection process and receive ample amount of applications suitable for an interview or further selection.

    Since only a quality JD can attract top candidates, many cutting edge companies are providing JD software to give real-time feedback and scores to recruiters to help them improve JDs.

    Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

    What are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?

    Key Performance Indicators are critical metrics that measure the performance and progress of an individual or team towards a pre-defined business goal.

    Key Performance Indicators consist of various sub-indicators – Quantitative indicators, Qualitative indicators, Directional indicators, Process indicators.

    Steps to determine Key performance indicator:

  • Defining the goal
  • Identifying the processes to reach the goal
  • Identifying the tools/resources/other requirements for applying the process.
  • Determining the qualitative/quantitative measure of the result and comparing it with the intended goal.
  • Monitoring, controlling, and measuring variability.

    • Labor Cost

    What is Labor Cost?

    The total cost incurred on paying the wages, benefits, and taxes to all staff is referred to as the labor cost incurred by an organization.

    Labor cost can be of two types: Direct and Indirect

    Direct Labor Costs: is described as the cost to human resources involved directly in making the product.

    Indirect Labor Costs: the cost incurred to pay the support functions that assisted the direct team is called indirect labor costs

    Minimum Wage

    What is the Minimum Wage?

    The minimum amount of remuneration that an employer has to pay as decided by the law is called the minimum wage. The minimum wage differs from region to region.

    Following are the major dimensions of the minimum wage:

  • It should cover the basic needs of the workers and their families
  • It should compile with regulations set by the government
  • It should cover each and every employee of the company
  • The minimum wage cannot be reduced by the employer or even a collective agreement.

    • Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA)

    What is a Nondisclosure Agreement?

    The Nondisclosure agreement (NDA) is a legally enforceable contract between two or more parties that binds them to not share information about the business of the involved parties.
    Nondisclosure agreement ensures that the parties refrain from sharing any confidential business information with the outside world.

    Here are the essential components of an NDA:

  • Specifications and details about the parties involved
  • Clearly defined confidential information
  • What are the exceptions/exclusions/instances outside the agreement?
  • Duration of the agreement
  • Any additional provisions

    • Outsourcing

    What is Outsourcing in Recruitment?

    Outsourcing in Recruitment involves a company shifting all or part of its recruitment process to an external agency. Outsourcing in the recruitment industry is typically known as Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO). The employer often transfers the non-core functions to the external agency to free-up time for its own employees.

    RPOs are done both as an integrated extension of the hiring team, or full-service outsourcing.

    People Analytics

    What is People Analytics?

    According to Heuvel & Bondarouk: “HR analytics is the systematic identification and quantification of the people drivers of business outcomes.” Analytics enables HR professionals to make data-driven decisions. Furthermore, analytics helps to test the effectiveness of HR policies and different interventions. Some of the metrics include –
    Turnover ratio, Absence rate, total time to hire, number of annual leaves etc.

    Benefits of People Analytics for HR:

  • Make better decisions using data
  • Create a business case for HR interventions
  • Test the effectiveness of these interventions
  • Move from an operational partner to a tactical, or even strategic partner

    • Resume Parser

    What is Resume Parser?

    Resume Parsing, formally speaking, is the conversion of a free-form CV/resume document into structured information — suitable for storage, reporting, and manipulation by a computer.

    Resume parsers analyze a resume, extract the desired information, and insert the information into a database with a unique entry for each candidate. Once the resume has been analyzed, a recruiter can search the database for keywords and phrases and get a list of relevant candidates.

    Benefits of Resume Parsing:

  • Processes various file formats
  • Deciphers complex resumes
    Saves recruiters time and improves efficiency in recruitment
  • Processes every resume ensuring that the best candidates are not missed out
  • Improved accuracy of information extraction
  • Auto-fill of application forms resulting in improved candidate experience

    • Remote hiring/recruitment

    What is Remote Hiring?

    Remote hiring is the recruitment of talents who work outside the physical office space. These staff members work from home, coworking spaces, different cities, or different countries altogether. The recruiters who focus especially on hiring remote talents are called remote recruiters.

    Benefits of remote hiring:

  • Access to a wider pool of talent, all over the world
    Reduced cost of hiring and employees
  • Research shows that remote workers are more productive
  • Increased employee retention


    • How can companies hire remotely?

    To learn about the processes and tools for hiring remotely, visit: https://skillate.com/blog/remote-work-tools/

    Sourcing

    What is Sourcing in recruitment?

    Sourcing is the process of actively searching for suitable candidates for a current or future opening in the organization. The goal is to collect and store relevant data from qualified candidates, for example, name, work experience, educational qualifications, skills, etc.

    The Process of Sourcing

    Sourcing includes contacting both passive and active candidates. However, sourcing is different from passively reviewing applications sent by candidates in response to a job posting or a pre-screening round. Sourcing consists of reaching out to candidates by the means of job boards, social media, job fairs, recruiting agencies, or other kinds of networking.

    Why sourcing is an issue for enterprises

  • No streamlined process of sourcing, fragmented market
  • Difficult to engage passive employees
  • Too many non-relevant applications
  • Competitive market and increasing candidate expectations


    • Benefits of sourcing for recruiters

  • Reduced time to hire
  • Connect with talent before the need arises
  • Broader reach with access to different platforms
  • An established relationship means more offer acceptance ratio.

    • Time to Hire

    What is Time to Hire?

    Time to hire is the number of days between the candidate responding to a job posting to accepting the final offer. This metric is used by recruiters to identify and remove inefficiencies from the recruitment process.

    Improving Time to Hire not only provides the company with a qualified personnel in less amount of time but it also enhances the candidate experience.

    How to measure Time to Hire?

    Even though most ATSs come with an inbuilt tracker of the average time to hire, if a recruiter wants to calculate it separately he or she can use this formula:

  • Calculate the total time to hire for each role in the given time period
  • Divide it by the total number of hires made in that period
  • The result now is the average time to hire of your organization.

    • Union

    What is Union?

    A union or labor union is a formal association of workers of a particular profession or organization formed to protect and further collective rights and objectives. Unions allow workers to do better bargaining in terms of pay, working hours, work conditions, etc.

    A union is generally financed by periodical funds provided by its members. Unions works in a democratic way – they hold periodical elections to elect leaders who represent the demands of all its members.

    Virtual Campus hiring

    What is Virtual Campus Hiring?

    Simply put, Virtual Campus Hiring is the recruitment of young, entry-level employees and interns freshly out of colleges. With the advent of COVID, and recruitment costs increasing in general, a lot of companies have switched their campus drives to a remote hiring process.

    Advantages of virtual campus hiring:

  • No need to travel to different locations for recruiters
  • No more repetitive pre-placement talks and presentations
  • Less logistical hassles – means more candidates can be screened together
  • No need to manually screen candidates or manually evaluate assignments
  • Efficient process and reduced recruitment costs

    • Workforce Planning

    What is Workforce Planning?

    The process of analyzing the current strengths and gaps in the workforce and forecasting the needs of the organization in terms of labor is called Workforce Planning.

    Workforce planning involves understanding the number of people required in the future, the required skills, experience, type of role – so that the organization can fulfill its strategic goals.

    Workforce planning can be –

  • Long-term – yearly or for many years
  • Medium-term – for months, extending up to a year
  • Short-term – Weeks, extending up to a month

    • Yield Ratio

    What is a Yield Ratio?

    Yield ratio is a recruiting metric to measure the performance of a specific method of hiring. It tells us the percentage of candidates selected from one round to the other.

    How to calculate Yield Ratio/Formula for Yield Ratio

    Yield ratio for a particular interview stage is calculated as:

    Number of selected candidates from stage x/ total number of candidates appearing in stage x = Yield Ratio for stage x

    Benefits

    The yield ratio represents how efficient is a particular method or source of hiring. This allows organizations to filter out the non-effective sources/methods or to improve the required processes.