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The New Dictionary of Hiring
Better words for the business of finding the people your strategy depends on.
Hiring inherited the language of HR.
That explains a lot.
Requisitions. Vacancies. Applicants. Passive candidates. Time to fill. Cost per hire.
Useful words if you're managing a recruiting process.
Less useful if you're trying to explain why the business can't open the new location, ship the product, accept another project, enter the market or hit the growth plan because three people you don't employ yet stand in the way.
Businesses don't need filled requisitions.
They need capabilities.
They don't have “hard-to-fill roles.”
They have strategic dependencies.
They don't have “passive candidates.”
The people they need are employed capability currently creating value for somebody else.
And the important question isn't always:
What will it cost to hire them?
Sometimes it's:
What is it costing us not to?
The New Dictionary of Hiring is an attempt to give talent leaders—and the businesses they serve—a better language.
Not new jargon for the sake of new jargon.
Better words for seeing the problem.
THE ESSENTIALs
The Twelve
Definition: The small number of people or capabilities upon whom a disproportionate amount of next year's plan depends.
Most companies forecast hiring in volume: 42 engineers, 18 salespeople, 11 project managers. Useful for budgeting. Less useful for understanding which hires actually matter.
Somewhere inside that plan is a much smaller group whose absence changes what the company can do: the regulatory expert required to enter the market, the estimator required to bid the work, the clinical specialist required to open the service, the leader required to build the team. Those are The Twelve. There may be seven. There may be twenty. The number isn't really the point. Prioritization is.
Instead of: Treating every requisition as roughly equal.
Ask: Which twelve people does next year's plan depend on, and where do they work right now?
Capability Gap
Definition: The difference between what the business needs to be able to do and what its current people allow it to do.
A vacancy tells you there's an empty box on the org chart. A Capability Gap tells you something more useful: what the business cannot currently do.
That distinction matters because nobody on the executive team wakes up worried that req #008742 has been open for 67 days. They may care very much that the company still can't commission another plant, launch in France or take on another client.
Instead of: Open requisition or vacancy.
Ask: What can't the business do until this person arrives?
Strategic Dependency
Definition: A person or capability without which an important business objective becomes harder, slower or impossible.
“Critical requisition” tells the business that recruiting thinks a job is important. Strategic Dependency tells the business what depends on it. That's a small linguistic change with a large political effect.
If a $20 million expansion depends on hiring one specialist, the specialist isn't merely a priority vacancy. They're part of the operating logic of the expansion.
Instead of: Critical requisition.
Ask: What business outcome depends on this hire?
Talent Debt
Definition: Strategic commitments made without possessing the people required to deliver them.
Companies commit to growth before hiring the team, sell work before building the capacity, announce expansion before securing the expertise, and then discover that the people problem has somehow become urgent.
That's Talent Debt. Like most debt, it feels wonderfully inexpensive while you're taking it on. The bill arrives later, usually marked “urgent hiring need.”
Instead of: Treating hiring as something that happens after strategy.
Ask: How much of the strategy have we already promised before securing the people required to execute it?
Cost of Absence
Definition: The economic consequence of not having a required capability when the business needs it.
Cost per hire measures what recruiting spent. Cost of Absence measures what the business lost while waiting: revenue delayed, projects declined, customers waiting, employees stretched, agencies hired and opportunities missed.
The expensive option is not always hiring someone. Sometimes the really expensive option is another three months without them.
Instead of: Cost per hire as the only financial conversation.
Ask: What does another month without this person cost us?
Time to Capability
Definition: How long the business waits between realizing it needs something and actually becoming able to do it.
Time to fill usually ends when recruiting gets a yes. Unfortunately, the business may still be waiting through notice periods, onboarding and ramp-up before the capability actually arrives.
A recruiting process can finish weeks before the business gets what it needed in the first place. Time to Capability measures the wait the business actually experiences.
Instead of: Time to fill.
Ask: When does the business actually become capable?
Employed Capability
Definition: A person who possesses something the business needs and is currently creating value for somebody else.
Recruiting calls these people “passive candidates,” which is an extraordinary description of someone currently succeeding in a full-time job. They're not passive. They're busy.
This framing changes the question from “How do we get them to respond?” to “Why should someone already doing valuable work somewhere else interrupt their career for us?” The second question is harder. It is also much more useful.
Instead of: Passive candidate.
Ask: Why would somebody successfully creating value somewhere else interrupt their career for us?
Unstaffed Commitment
Definition: A promise the business has made before securing the people required to keep it.
The company signs the work, announces the launch, commits to the deadline or sets the growth target.
Then somebody says, “Now we just need to hire the team.”
That little word just is doing spectacular amounts of work. An Unstaffed Commitment makes visible the fact that the business has already promised an outcome whose human dependencies remain unresolved.
Instead of: Discovering hiring requirements after the commitment has been made.
Ask: Which promises have we already made that depend on people we do not yet employ?
Talent Risk
Definition: Business risk created by uncertainty about whether necessary people will be available when the strategy needs them.
Companies maintain registers for financial risk, cyber risk, operational risk, supplier risk and regulatory risk. Then they build a strategy dependent on five nearly impossible hires and call them “open reqs.”
If the absence of a person can derail execution, that is not merely a recruiting inconvenience. It is business risk wearing an HR name badge.
Instead of: Treating hard-to-fill hiring as an HR problem.
Ask: Which parts of the plan are exposed because we aren't confident we can obtain or retain the people they require?
Indifference Tax
Definition: The extra money, effort and recruiting force required because the people you need don't particularly care whether they work for you.
Indifference is not free. You pay for it in more sourcing, more advertising, more agencies, more recruiter time, more outreach, more compensation and longer searches.
If talent doesn't prefer you, you don't avoid paying. You simply pay somewhere else. Employer brand often looks expensive only because nobody puts the cost of indifference on the other side of the spreadsheet.
Instead of: Assuming weak employer preference has no financial consequence.
Ask: How much recruiting spend exists because we haven't created preference in advance?
Preference Debt
Definition: Future recruiting difficulty created by failing to build meaningful reasons for important talent to choose you today.
Preference Debt is wonderfully invisible while hiring is quiet. Nobody worries about it while the people you'll need next year are happily working somewhere else and have no reason to think about you.
Then the strategy changes, the requisitions open and everyone discovers they're starting every important relationship from zero. Like Talent Debt, Preference Debt is easiest to ignore before it becomes expensive.
Instead of: Switching employer brand on only when hiring becomes urgent.
Ask: When we need these people next year, will we already mean something to them?
Preference Infrastructure
Definition: The reputation, positioning, proof and market presence that make the right people more likely to choose you before hiring becomes urgent.
Employer brand often sounds like communications because most of its visible outputs are communications. But its real value is closer to infrastructure: something built in advance because the business expects to depend on it later.
You don't build the bridge after the trucks arrive. You shouldn't begin creating talent preference after the critical requisition opens either.
Instead of: Employer brand as careers-site content and campaigns.
Ask: What are we building today that makes tomorrow's critical hires easier?
STRATEGY
The Hiring Assumption
Definition: The largely unexamined assumption inside many strategies that the people necessary to execute them will somehow be available.
Strategy decks interrogate market size, competition, capital, pricing, regulation and customer demand in excruciating detail. Then somewhere near the end appears a box reading Build team.
Apparently that bit will take care of itself. It usually doesn't. The Hiring Assumption is useful because it forces leadership to treat access to people as an assumption to test, not a miracle to schedule for Q3.
Instead of: Assuming people will appear once the plan is approved.
Ask: What does this strategy assume we will be able to hire?
Talent-Limited Growth
Definition: A condition in which the business could grow faster if it could acquire the necessary people faster.
Sometimes demand isn't the constraint. Capital isn't the constraint. The market isn't the constraint. There is work to take, customers to serve and money to be made, but the company cannot execute more with the capability it currently has.
That's Talent-Limited Growth. It reframes recruiting from a support activity to one of the things physically determining the organization's growth rate.
Instead of: Calling every hiring shortage a recruiting problem.
Ask: Where could the business grow faster if it had access to more of the right capability?
Capability Ceiling
Definition: The maximum amount of business the organization can execute with its current people.
Every organization has one. You can sell beyond it, forecast beyond it and make heroic PowerPoint promises beyond it. You just can't sustainably operate beyond it.
The Capability Ceiling is useful because it turns headcount into capacity. Instead of asking how many people the business wants, ask where the current organization stops being able to deliver.
Instead of: Treating headcount only as cost.
Ask: Where is our current capability ceiling limiting growth?
Capability Unlock
Definition: A person or capability whose arrival makes something previously constrained possible.
One hire can allow a company to bid the project, open the territory, launch the service, sign another customer or remove a bottleneck holding back ten other people. That person's value is not well described by “filled vacancy.”
A Capability Unlock directs attention to what changes elsewhere in the business because somebody arrived.
Instead of: Measuring every hire by the seat they occupy.
Ask: What becomes possible once this person is here?
Risk
Talent Risk Register
Definition: A prioritized record of the people and capabilities whose absence could materially affect the business plan.
A normal requisition report tells you job title, recruiter, days open and candidate count. All useful if you're running recruiting. A Talent Risk Register asks different questions: What capability do we need? What does the business depend on it for? When must it be present? How difficult will it be to obtain? What happens if we fail?
The point is not to make recruiting reports sound grander. The point is to expose the business consequences hiding underneath them.
Instead of: A list of “priority reqs.”
Ask: Which unresolved talent dependencies create material risk to the plan?
Single-Person Dependency
Definition: A strategically important capability that effectively resides in one person.
Many organizations have a surprising number of these. Everything is completely fine unless Susan leaves.
Susan, naturally, has just updated LinkedIn.
Single-Person Dependency gives leaders a simple way to spot human single points of failure before they're discovered via farewell email.
Instead of: Assuming current capability is secure simply because someone currently provides it.
Ask: Which important things can only one person here currently do?
Replacement Horizon
Definition: How long it would realistically take to restore an important capability if the person currently providing it disappeared tomorrow.
Some employees can be replaced quickly. Others leave behind a six-month hole nobody knew existed until they walked out.
The Replacement Horizon makes retention risk concrete. “We'd hate to lose her” is sentiment. “It would take nine months to restore that capability” is planning.
Instead of: Treating all regrettable attrition as equally regrettable.
Ask: If this person left tomorrow, how long before the business was whole again?
Acquisition Risk
Definition: The likelihood that the organization will fail to secure a required capability inside the period when the business needs it.
“Hard to fill” describes recruiting's feelings. Acquisition Risk describes the business's exposure. One is annoying. The other belongs in planning.
This term is especially useful when leadership assumes a strategic dependency can simply be posted, sourced and hired on command.
Instead of: Hard-to-fill role.
Ask: How confident are we that this capability will arrive before the business needs it?
Economics
Absence Burn
Definition: The business value lost while a required capability remains missing.
Some vacancies are inconvenient. Some are quietly burning $100,000 a month. Treating them the same because both happen to be rows in the ATS is not prioritization.
Absence Burn turns delay into something visible. It also makes “let's keep looking for another month” sound less like the free option it usually appears to be.
Instead of: Vacancy age without economic context.
Ask: What is this unresolved gap costing us every week?
Opportunity Leakage
Definition: Revenue, projects, customers or growth the business loses because it lacks the people necessary to pursue them.
Companies are very good at tracking revenue won. They're much less good at tracking revenue that never had a chance because the organization couldn't staff the work.
Opportunity Leakage is the work you don't bid, the customers you don't pursue and the expansion you postpone because capacity wasn't there. It doesn't appear on the recruiting dashboard. That doesn't mean it isn't real.
Instead of: Treating unpursued opportunity as unrelated to talent.
Ask: What business are we not even attempting because we cannot staff it?
Movement Premium
Definition: The additional value an employed person needs before leaving a known situation for an uncertain one becomes worthwhile.
Your vacancy isn't competing with unemployment. It is competing with the person's manager, reputation, flexibility, colleagues, commute, stock, seniority, political capital and the comforting fact that Tuesday currently feels predictable.
A 7% raise may therefore not be the irresistible adventure you imagine. Understanding the Movement Premium forces employers to think about the total reason to move, not just the offer number.
Instead of: Assuming everyone has a price and you've simply guessed it incorrectly.
Ask: What would have to become meaningfully better for this person to leave what they already have?
Compensation Substitution
Definition: Using more money to compensate for an opportunity people otherwise have too little reason to choose.
Sometimes a salary premium reflects genuine market scarcity. Sometimes it reflects the fact that the competitor's opportunity is simply more compelling.
Those are not the same problem. Compensation Substitution is useful because it asks whether money is paying for the capability—or compensating for everything else.
Instead of: Assuming compensation is always the root cause of hiring difficulty.
Ask: Are we paying for scarcity, or paying because people don't prefer the opportunity?
Sameness Tax
Definition: The economic penalty created when your employment proposition is indistinguishable from everybody else's.
If you say “make an impact,” “grow your career,” “do meaningful work,” “amazing culture” and “great people,” and your competitors say exactly the same thing, candidates need another way to decide.
Often that's salary, title, location or convenience. Sameness therefore isn't neutral. It pushes competition toward the things that are easiest to compare and most expensive to improve.
Instead of: Treating generic employer messaging as merely boring.
Ask: What are we paying because candidates can't see a meaningful difference?
Preference Dividend
Definition: The recurring economic advantage created when the people you need already know you, understand your difference and are inclined to consider you.
Preference can produce more responses, more applicants, higher acceptance, less sourcing, fewer agencies, less compensation pressure and faster hiring. None of those looks much like “brand awareness.”
The Preference Dividend is what happens when employer brand stops being treated as decoration and starts making the mechanics of hiring easier.
Instead of: Measuring employer brand only through reach and impressions.
Ask: What becomes cheaper, faster or easier because the right people already prefer us?
The Talent Market
Capability Market
Definition: The total population of people who possess something the business needs, whether or not any of them are job hunting.
Your applicants are not the market. They're the people who happened to show up.
That is a very different thing, particularly for scarce capabilities where the strongest potential hires may have no intention of entering your funnel voluntarily.
Instead of: Talent pool.
Ask: Where does the capability actually live, not just where are the applicants?
Talent Competitor
Definition: Any organization competing with you for the same people, regardless of whether it competes with you commercially.
Your biggest commercial competitor may never hire your engineers. The bank across town might.
Talent competition follows people, not industry classifications. Once you understand that, competitor analysis starts looking very different.
Instead of: Assuming commercial competitors are automatically talent competitors.
Ask: Where else could the people we need plausibly choose to work?
Talent Scarcity
Definition: A mismatch between how badly organizations need a capability and how many realistically accessible people possess it.
Scarcity is not “we only got four applicants.” That might be scarcity. It might also be a terrible job ad, an obscure company, an unrealistic location requirement or a recruiting process designed in 2009.
Talent Scarcity is a market condition. Bad recruiting is something else. It's useful to know which problem you actually have.
Instead of: Calling every difficult search a talent shortage.
Ask: Is the capability truly scarce, or are we simply failing to access the market?
Share of Consideration
Definition: The proportion of the people you need who would seriously consider working for you.
Awareness asks whether people have heard of you. Share of Consideration asks whether they would actually take the call.
That's a much more valuable measure because hiring doesn't require everyone to know your name. It requires enough of the right people to put you on the list.
Instead of: Employer awareness as the primary brand goal.
Ask: Of the people we most need, how many would seriously consider us?
Recruiting Gravity
Definition: An employer's ability to make valuable people move toward it rather than relying entirely on recruiters to chase them.
Weak employer preference requires push: emails, ads, InMails, agencies and follow-ups. Strong employer preference creates some degree of pull.
The goal isn't to stop recruiting. It's to stop making recruiting do absolutely everything.
Instead of: Assuming more outbound effort is the only way to increase hiring.
Ask: How much easier would recruiting become if more of the people we wanted already wanted us?
Choice
Choosability
Definition: The degree to which the people an organization needs understand why they should choose it over realistic alternatives.
The goal of employer brand is not to become universally attractive. That would be both impossible and, frankly, suspicious.
The goal is to become meaningfully choosable to the people the business needs. That means being clear about what you offer, who will value it and why someone should select you when they have other credible options.
Instead of: Trying to be attractive to everybody.
Ask: Why should the particular people we need choose us?
Choice Problem
Definition: A hiring problem caused not by inability to find suitable people, but by inability to make those people choose you.
This distinction matters because companies routinely respond to Choice Problems by sourcing harder.
The result is often a larger number of people entering the funnel and eventually choosing somebody else. More supply doesn't fix weak preference.
Instead of: Treating every hiring problem as a sourcing problem.
Ask: Are we failing to find the people—or failing to make them choose us?
Proof Problem
Definition: A situation in which the employer makes attractive claims but provides too little evidence for people to believe them.
You say people grow quickly. Prove it. You say leaders trust employees. Prove it. You say the work matters. Prove it.
“Authentic” is not proof. It's usually just an adjective placed immediately before another unsupported claim.
Instead of: Polishing claims nobody has reason to believe.
Ask: What evidence would make this promise credible?
Movement Threshold
Definition: The point at which changing jobs finally feels more valuable than staying put.
For someone unemployed, that threshold may be relatively low. For an excellent employee with a good manager, flexibility, strong relationships and a bonus arriving in March, it may be considerably higher.
The Movement Threshold reminds recruiters that “good opportunity” is not an absolute standard. It must be good enough to outweigh what this particular person already has.
Instead of: Assuming interest in your role is independent of someone's current situation.
Ask: What would make moving worth the disruption?
Switching Burden
Definition: Everything an employed person risks, loses or must rebuild when they leave their current company.
Relationships, credibility, routine, reputation, influence, knowledge, flexibility and certainty all have value. They may not appear on a paystub, but candidates know they're there.
Recruiting naturally focuses on what someone gains by moving. Candidates tend to spend rather more time thinking about what they might lose.
Instead of: Evaluating an offer only by what the new company provides.
Ask: What does this person have to give up in order to say yes to us?
Choice Friction
Definition: Anything that makes choosing the employer unnecessarily difficult.
Seven interviews. A disappearing recruiter. A job description written by committee. A careers site that says nothing. An offer nobody can explain. A hiring manager who answers every question with “it depends.”
None of these may kill the hire individually. Together they make choosing you harder than it needs to be.
Instead of: Treating candidate drop-off as mysterious.
Ask: Where are we making a yes unnecessarily difficult?
Message-Market Fit
Definition: The degree to which what an employer says actually matters to the people it needs.
An EVP can be true, beautifully written, enthusiastically approved by leadership and completely irrelevant to the person you're trying to hire.
Congratulations on the alignment.
Message-Market Fit forces the test that matters: not “Do we like this?” but “Does this change how the target audience sees the choice?”
Instead of: Judging employer messaging primarily through internal approval.
Ask: Does this message matter enough to influence the people we're trying to hire?
Employer Brand
Talent Demand Creation
Definition: Creating interest in working for the organization before asking anyone to apply.
Recruitment captures existing demand. Employer brand can create demand.
That distinction changes the job considerably. Instead of waiting until a requisition opens and then looking for attention, the organization can spend time making future talent markets more receptive before the ask arrives.
Instead of: Candidate attraction that begins with an open job.
Ask: How are we making future candidates interested before we need anything from them?
Employer Distinctiveness
Definition: The extent to which the people you need can identify a meaningful reason your company is different from the alternatives.
Distinctive does not mean quirky. It means recognizable, specific, relevant and provable.
If your employer brand could be pasted onto a competitor's careers site and nobody would notice, you do not have a differentiation problem in theory. You have one in practice.
Instead of: Trying merely to sound attractive.
Ask: What can candidates say about us that they could not honestly say about the five employers next to us?
Proof Bank
Definition: A structured collection of facts, stories, examples and evidence that demonstrate why your employment claims are true.
Every employer promise should come with receipts. “We empower people” is a claim. “An engineer six months out of school stopped a production release because she believed it wasn't ready” teaches me something.
A Proof Bank turns employer brand from adjectives into evidence and gives recruiters, hiring managers, marketers and leaders something useful to actually say.
Instead of: Repeating unsupported brand claims.
Ask: What happened here that proves this is true?
Employer Sameness
Definition: The condition created when companies make essentially interchangeable promises about what it is like to work there.
Everyone is innovative. Everyone collaborates. Everyone makes an impact. Everyone values people. Everyone is apparently changing the world.
One begins to wonder how the world has survived all this change.
Employer Sameness is dangerous because the claims may all be true. They're simply useless for making a choice.
Instead of: Assuming truth automatically creates differentiation.
Ask: What are we saying that our competitors cannot say just as easily?
THREE TOOLS WORTH STEALING
The Twelve Clause
One question added to every serious strategic plan: Which capabilities must we acquire externally for this plan to work?
Ask it while the strategy is still being built, not after the work has been sold, the budget committed and HR receives a spreadsheet with 47 “urgent” hires.
The Twelve Clause brings talent into strategy at the moment when there is still time to make intelligent choices.
The Talent Risk Register
A simple business-risk view of the capabilities the strategy depends upon and the consequences if they do not arrive.
For every critical dependency, record the capability needed, business objective dependent on it, capability deadline, current coverage, likely source market, Acquisition Risk, Cost of Absence and Plan B.
Congratulations. You have just transformed a requisition report into something a COO might actually read.
The Capability Receipt
A one-line test for whether everyone understands the business value of an important hire.
Finish this sentence:
Because this person is here, the business can now ____________.
If the answer is “fill the role,” try again.
The Capability Receipt is useful because it forces everybody to connect the person to the outcome. Once that connection is clear, priority, investment and measurement become much easier to discuss.
STOP SAYING. START SAYING.
Stop Saying
Start Saying
WHY THE WORDS MATTER
An open requisition sounds administrative. A Capability Gap describes something the business cannot currently do. A critical req sounds like recruiting asking for urgency. A Strategic Dependency tells leadership what the plan depends on.
A passive candidate sounds like somebody recruiters haven't activated. Employed Capability reminds everyone that the person is already busy generating value elsewhere. Time to fill tells you when recruiting finished. Time to Capability tells you when the business stopped waiting. Cost per hire asks how much it cost to recruit somebody. Cost of Absence asks how expensive it is not to.
And employer brand can still sound suspiciously like careers-site photography. Preference Infrastructure makes the job much clearer: build the reasons people will choose you before the business desperately needs them to.
That is the point of this dictionary. Not to give HR more language.
To give the business better language for hiring.
ONE QUESTION TO TAKE WITH YOU
Look at next year's business plan. Ignore total headcount for a moment. Ignore requisition volume, time to fill and cost per hire.
Ask: Which twelve people does this plan depend on—and where do they work right now?
The answer will tell you much more about your hiring strategy than the requisition forecast ever will.
The New Dictionary of Hiring
Created by Employer Brand Labs.
Because the business cannot grow faster than it can acquire the capability to grow.
The cheapest way to fix your pipeline is to stop sounding like everyone else.
