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The recruitment software glossary

Our recruitment software glossary aims to clarify the most commonly used terms and acronyms you’ll often hear when discussing recruitment software and technology.

Recruitment CRM software Glossary
Recruitment CRM software Glossary
Recruitment CRM software Glossary

Active Candidate

An active candidate is someone who is actively looking for a new job opportunity by reaching out to their professional networks, searching across social media / job boards, applying to job ads or attending interviews.

Analytics

An active candidate is someone who is actively looking for a new job opportunity by reaching out to their professional networks, searching across social media / job boards, applying to job ads or attending interviews.

Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

An applicant tracking system helps record and manage all of your candidate and vacancy information. Candidates can be shortlisted for vacancies, scheduled for interviews, and tracked through entire acquisition to placement process.

Application Programme Interface (API)

An API is a software-to-software interface, not a user interface. With APIs, applications talk to each other without any user knowledge or intervention. An API is a list of commands as well as the format of those commands that one application can send to another.

Back Office

The back office comprises of the departments that don’t directly generate revenue for the business but are still essential for the daily running of an business, focusing on processing and support functions. Departments that typically are referred to as back office are IT, Operations, HR, Accounting and Finance.

Big Data

Big data is a term that describes the large volume of data, both structured and unstructured that may be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations.

Boolean

Boolean search is a logic based search theory that was originally developed by English Mathematician George Boole in the 19th Century. Boolean is a system of logical thought and will often be used to search the web or a recruitment database.

Learn the 6 basic Boolean search operators for recruiters in our blog.

Business Intelligence (BI)

Business Intelligence is the action of analysing data to make more informed strategic decisions. There are now dedicated BI software solutions for recruitment agencies that can be integrated into your recruitment software solution.

Learn more about BI for recruitment agencies in our blog.

Chatbot

Chatbot is a is a computer program which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. A Chatbot can help recruiters by collecting information on candidates, ask screening questions, answer FAQs, and schedule interviews.

Learn about Chatbots in recruitment in our blog.

Cloud / Cloud Computing

Cloud is where a company’s IT infrastructure, servers, storage, databases and software are hosted by an external provider in a remote datacentre (in the cloud) and is accessed over the internet.

Looking for a cloud solution? Take a look at the Eclipse Cloud.

Compliance

The term compliance describes the ability to act according to an order, set of rules or request. Recruitment compliance is essential to ensure best practice within the industry to ensure candidate are compliant before placement as prescribed by government, client, framework or PSL agreements.

Comma-separated Values (CSV)

CSV is a common file type that’s used to import data and allows data to be saved in a structured table format. With CSV, data can be imported from one software application to another.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM software is technology that manages and analyses customer contact management, sales management, interactions and data throughout the customer life cycle.

CV / Resume Parsing

CV / resume parsing extracts information from a candidate’s CV into a structured format for populating into a candidate record within a recruitment software solution.

Dashboard

A dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of data from a recruitment database. Dashboards are usually customisable enabling the user to select or filter data either by date range, data type or by a visual display type.

Data Migration

A data migration simply refers to the transfer of data from one source into another. The complexity of a data migration depends entirely on the type of data you wish to be extracted from your existing recruitment CRM, applications or manual spreadsheets and imported into your new recruitment software.

Learn about 5 considerations for a successful data migration in our blog.

Data Partitioning

Data partitioning is the process of logically and/or physically partitioning data into segments that are more easily maintained or accessed.

Document Management System (DMS)

A DMS is the use of a computer system / software to centrally store, manage and track electronic documents.

Front Office

Front office is the departments of the business that have direct contact with customers, candidates or clients. Usually this includes the sales, business development or account management teams.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

GDPR is a regulation by which the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission intend to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU). GDPR will apply in all EU member states from 25 May 2018.

What does GDPR mean for recruitment agencies? Find out here.

Google Analytics (GA)

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. GA includes analytical tools for search engine optimisation (SEO) and marketing purposes.

HTML

HTML stands for “Hyper-Text Markup Language” and is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications. Email also uses HTML as the format of rich text messages that include links, stylized text, tables, and other elements that cannot be represented in plain text.

Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP)

IMAP allows a user to access emails from multiple devices as it isn’t actually downloading or storing on the device; instead, it is being reading and synced from the email service. IMAP is a recommended method when uses need to access emails from multiple devices, such as a phone, laptop and within a recruitment CRM.

Invoice Rate

An invoice rate is the hourly or daily rate a recruitment agency will charge a client for a temporary worker being onsite and working. Generally the invoice rate consists of the candidate’s pay rate, payroll costs and the agencies margin/markup.

Job Advert Distribution

Job advert distribution software enables recruiters to instantly distribute a job advert to multiple selected job boards and social media channels simultaneously.

Job Aggregator

A job aggregator collects job postings from job boards around the internet and consolidates them into one site so that they are easily searchable based on keywords and location. E.g. Indeed

Master Vendor

A master vendor agreement is a subcontracting arrangement where a recruitment agency acts as the ‘sole provider’ (single point of contact), for a company’s recruitment and staffing requirements.

Mailshots

Typically, a mailshot is sending an email to communicate a promotional, marketing or information to a large group of selected people.

Learn the 3 reasons why to send emails through your recruitment CRM software in our blog.

Middle Office

Although this is less commonly used, and usually only referred to in financial services, typically, the middle office supports the customer facing teams with administrative tasks but it can also include compliance and risk management.

On-Premise

On-premise is where a company’s IT infrastructure is on-site, and is managed by a IT department or IT provider who administers and maintains the hardware, applications or databases whilst managing backups, compliance and security.

Passive Candidate

A passive candidate is someone who is generally employed but not currently looking for a new job opportunity.

Learn how to build a passive candidate pipeline in our blog.

Pay Rate

A pay rate is amount of money an employee receives from an employer. In relations to a temporary employee a pay rate can be hourly or daily.

Portable Document Format (PDF)

A PDF is a file format developed by Adobe Systems. PDF files are primarily meant for viewing, not editing which is why they’re so popular as they preserve document formatting, which makes them more shareable and helps them to look the same on any device.

Recruitment CRM / Recruitment Management System (RMS)

Generally speaking, a recruitment CRM or RMS combines both the functionality of a CRM and ATS all within one software solution. These solutions are generally more expensive as they have a lot more functionality than a standard ATS or CRM software solution.

Recruitment Software

Recruitment software is technology to manage a companies recruitment process. The functionality of recruitment software dramatically differs across the market from recording and managing candidate, client, vacancy, placement, temporary timesheet processing and client invoicing data. Depending on the software provider, recruitment software can be a fully integrated solution or can integrate with a number of other solutions. The term recruitment software is often used to discuss more specialist products such as ATS or Recruitment CRMs.

Which type of recruitment software is right for you? See our blog.

RSS / XML Feed

RSS/XML Feed is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, blogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whomever wants it.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is a strategy that involves techniques and tactics to increase the amount of organic visitors /traffic to a website page by obtaining a high ranking position in search engine results pages.

Learn how to optimise SEO for your recruitment agency’s website. See our blog.

Single Sign-On (SSO)

Single Sign-On is a session or user verification process that allows someone to enter one name and password in order to access multiple applications or software. The Single Sign-On process authenticates the user for all the applications they’ve been given access to.

Short Message Service (SMS)

SMS stands for short message service and is also called texting or text messaging. SMS is used to send text messages to mobile phones from either another mobile or directly from a recruitment software solution.

To see our preferred SMS partners, click here.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS) is the licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis where the software is hosted in the cloud and accessed via the internet. It is sometimes referred to as “on-demand software”.

Talent Pool

A talent pool is a group of qualified candidates (by employment preference, experience, skills or geographical) that can be contacted when a vacancy is received. A talent pool can consist of active and passive candidates.

Temporary to Permanent (Temp to Perm)

Is the transition of a temporary worker to permanent employment status.

Time and Attendance

Time and Attendance systems are used to track and monitor when staff start and stop work, and can include recording late arrivals, early departures, time taken on breaks and absenteeism.

User Permissions

User permissions specify what tasks users can perform and what features or data users can access within a recruitment software CRM.

Vendor Management System (VMS)

A Vendor Management System (VMS) streamlines and automates the many processes that support the acquisition, management and payment of a business’s contingent workforce.