Glossary of terms

What does it all mean?

Here is the glossary of some of the jargon words and phrases used in recruitment communications that was first published in the Guide to Recruitment Marketing 2006. We need your help to develop a dynamic and comprehensive point of reference. more

What does it all mean?

As in many other fields of endeavour, new jargon crops up regularly in recruitment communications. Ri5 published a glossary of current words and phrases (some familiar, others less so), with interpretations and commentary, in the Guide to Recruitment Marketing 2006. Now we need your help to develop a dynamic and comprehensive point of reference. Ri5 and the People Management (www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/forrecruiters) websites are joining forces in this effort - we're inviting our massive combined audiences to submit suggestions, amendments, additions and questions. So consider the following - and then please, please get in touch!

glossary@ri5.co.uk

.jobs: the "super-suffix" that offers simplified direct entry to employers' recruitment web sites. The domain is ultimately controlled by the Society for Human Resources Management in the USA, which has appointed another company to run things day-to-day. (http://www.goto.jobs/)

Attraction: the initial interest felt by a candidate for an employer, sparked by reputation and/or advertising. "Aida" is an old mnemonic relating to what every advertisement, in any medium, should achieve: Attract - grab the attention of the people you want to talk to. Interest - say something that holds attention and creates. Desire - to try something, own something or find out more. Action - explain what to do next and how to do it.

Berliner: newspaper format adopted in 2005 by The Guardian and The Observer, somewhere between tabloid and broadsheet.

Blog: contraction of "web log". Bloggers publish their thoughts, ideas, and experiences, invite feedback, and interact with like-minded souls, while recruitment blogs allow organisations to provide a seemingly informal insight into their activities and character. Corporate blogs may be self-defeating if they are obviously corporatist; rogue blogs (for example, the thoughts and feelings of a disaffected employee) might need monitoring and managing.

Buzz marketing: a form of viral marketing. Undercover agents drop a nugget of marketing or recruitment information in a likely forum (for example, a chat room, blog or branch of Starbucks), in the hope that others will pick it up and pass it around relevant groups.

cloud computing: the provision of infrastructure, platform and software services over the internet,allowing users to harness massive computing power from eg Google, IBM, etc. on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Cost-per-hire: self-explanatory, perhaps, but increasingly used to assess the effectiveness of recruitment marketing strategies. Anyone using this as a measure of performance needs to be meticulous in defining what it means: include advertising, marketing and agency fees, but can you really be expected to answer for the all the costs of onboarding? (see "O")

Direct resourcing: when organisations take responsibility for their own talent attraction and retention strategies and tactics.

Diversity: everybody's talking about it but pinning down a definition is tricky. The CIPD's version is: "... the concept that people should be valued as individuals for reasons related to business interests, as well as for moral and social reasons. It recognises that people from different backgrounds can bring fresh ideas and perceptions which can make the way work is done more efficient and products and services better."

Employer brand: what existing, future and former employees know, feel and say about an employing organisation in terms of what it does, how it goes about its business and the way it treats its people. Simon Barrow, chairman of consultancy People in Business, is credited with coining the term back in the mid-1980s, and has now written a book on the subject with colleague Richard Mosley: The Employer Brand: Bringing the Best of Brand Management to People at Work (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2005). The preface includes the following (written by Barrow with Tim Ambler of the London Business School in 1996): "The main role of the employer brand is to provide a coherent framework for management to simplify and focus priorities, increase productivity and improve recruitment, retention and commitment."

Human capital management: all employees, established and new, add to an organisation's knowledge/intellectual capital. HCM is about optimizing the value of contributions through the effective management of recruitment, remuneration, and training.

Job boards: niche or generic, vertical or horizontal - job boards have been one of the Web's big success stories. There are thousands to choose from, and they continue to develop new services for advertisers and candidates across the globe.

Offshoring: the process of moving jobs from one country to another, typically from a developed economy to somewhere where wages are low. One estimate says that offshore employment will total just over 4 million service jobs by 2008. (The total number of such jobs in developed countries by that time is likely to exceed 400 million.)

Onboarding: relating to the point at which a recruit becomes an employee, and covering paperwork, benefits administration, induction training and much else besides.

RPO: recruitment process outsourcing, the antithesis of direct resourcing. RPO involves an employer handing many aspects of recruitment and retention to a third party. Remuneration can be linked to cost-per-hire targets.

RSS: "really simple syndication". Essentially, this is a personal web page that allows you to keep up with information you want by delivering the latest news and features to you in one place, rather than involving visits to a range of sites.

SMS: short message system (text-messaging on mobile phones), having various uses in recruitment. Related acronyms include EMS (Enhanced Messaging Service), MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language).

Talent: the sum total of a person's working parts, including intellect, knowledge, experience, capacity to develop, ambition, and so on. Everyone in the work market has talent - some are worth warring for more than others.

Talent crunch: a confluence of demographic factors, skills shortages and organisational shortcomings that could have devastating effects on ill-prepared organisations.

Talent management: with 75% of organisations believing they employ insufficient talent, looking after what you've got is a growing priority.

Talent pool: a list of likely internal and external likely candidates that can be tapped when a suitable opening arises, instead of launching each recruitment project from scratch.

Viral marketing: marketing technique that enables and encourages people to spread a marketing message by subterfuge or by including, for example, something funny, or interesting, or valuable.

Ideas, amendments, additions and questions to glossary@ri5.co.uk