Glossary
Tech recruitment, defined.
The terms hiring managers meet when they work with a recruitment agency, defined in one sentence each and explained in plain English, by people who do this work every day.
Terms
- Contingent recruitment
- Contingent recruitment is a hiring arrangement in which an agency is paid only if a candidate it introduced is hired, usually as a percentage of the first-year salary.
- Cost of vacancy
- Cost of vacancy is the value a business loses for every day a role stays unfilled, most conservatively estimated as the employed cost of the missing person pro rata to the days open.
- Counter-offer
- A counter-offer is an improved package a current employer makes to a resigning employee to persuade them to stay.
- Embedded recruitment
- Embedded recruitment is an arrangement in which a recruiter works inside a company for a fixed period, usually for a monthly fee, running its hiring as a member of the team rather than charging per placement.
- Engineering manager
- An engineering manager is responsible for the people, delivery and health of an engineering team, usually of five to ten engineers, rather than for writing most of its code.
- Founder-led recruitment agency
- A founder-led recruitment agency is one in which the people who own the business personally run the searches, rather than selling the work and handing it to junior consultants.
- Head of Engineering versus CTO
- A head of engineering runs the engineering organisation day to day, while a CTO owns technology strategy at board level; in small startups one person often does both until the company is large enough to split them.
- IR35
- IR35 is UK tax legislation that determines whether a contractor working through their own company should be taxed as an employee of the client for a given engagement.
- Passive candidate
- A passive candidate is someone who is employed and not actively looking for a job, but who would consider the right role if approached.
- Rebate period
- A rebate period is the agreed window after a placed candidate starts during which the recruitment fee is partly refunded, or the search is re-run free, if the candidate leaves.
- Retained search
- Retained search is a recruitment arrangement in which the client pays part of the fee upfront to secure a dedicated, exclusive search, with the balance paid at shortlist and placement.
- Staff engineer
- A staff engineer is a senior individual contributor who works across teams, owning technical direction, architecture and hard problems without managing people.
- Technical screening
- Technical screening is the assessment of a candidate's actual technical ability before they are put in front of a hiring manager, as distinct from matching keywords on a CV.
- Time to hire
- Time to hire is the number of days between a candidate entering the process and accepting an offer; time to fill measures from the role being opened to the offer being accepted.