- HRIS — Human Resource Information System
- A system of record for people data — names, roles, comp, lifecycle events. Examples: Workday, BambooHR, Rippling. The HRIS is the ‘source of truth’ that other tools sync from.
- ATS — Applicant Tracking System
- Software for managing candidate pipelines through a hiring funnel. Examples: Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever.
- HRBP — HR Business Partner
- An HR role embedded with a business unit, advising leaders on org design, hiring, performance, and people risk.
- OKRs — Objectives and Key Results
- A goal-setting framework where Objectives are qualitative and ambitious, and Key Results are quantitative measures of progress.
- OKR vs KPI — Different intent
- OKRs are aspirational and time-bound; KPIs are continuous performance indicators of a steady-state process. Most teams need both.
- Calibration — Cross-team review
- A meeting where managers review proposed ratings together to remove rater bias and align on the bar.
- 9-box — Performance × Potential grid
- A talent-review tool plotting performance vs. potential. Useful for succession discussion, dangerous if treated as a label.
- 30-60-90 plan — New-hire ramp plan
- Outcomes for a new hire at 30, 60, and 90 days. Owned by the manager, co-edited with the hire.
- PIP — Performance Improvement Plan
- A formal plan to close a defined gap within a defined time. Should never be the first time someone hears the feedback.
- ENPS — Employee Net Promoter Score
- ‘Would you recommend this place to work?’ on a 0–10 scale. Useful trend metric, weak point-in-time metric.
- Engagement vs satisfaction — Different things
- Satisfaction is contentment with the deal; engagement is discretionary effort. You can be satisfied and disengaged.
- Span of control — Reports per manager
- Typically 5–9 for managers doing real coaching, higher for stable execution teams.
- Compensation band — Min / mid / max for a level
- The salary range for a level (and location, if tiered). Bands enable consistent offers and reviews.
- Vesting — Equity earned over time
- Equity grants typically vest over 4 years with a 1-year cliff. After the cliff, monthly vesting is common.
- RSUs — Restricted Stock Units
- Shares granted but not delivered until vesting milestones are met. Common at later-stage and public companies.
- ISOs / NSOs — Stock option types
- Two US tax treatments for stock options. Different exercise and tax mechanics; talk to a tax advisor.
- Bar raiser — Cross-team interviewer
- An interviewer not on the hiring team whose veto can block a hire. Used at Amazon and others to defend the hiring bar.
- Continuous performance — Always-on feedback
- Replacing annual reviews with regular check-ins and feedback, often with lighter-touch year-end summaries.
- Pay transparency — Disclosed pay bands
- Practice of publishing salary bands and/or pay ranges on job ads. Required by law in several US states and EU directives.
- DEI — Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
- Practices that broaden who can succeed in your company. Goal: a workforce that mirrors the talent pool, with equitable processes.
- Quiet quitting — Doing the job, no more
- A 2022 label for setting hard work boundaries. Less a new behavior, more a new public conversation about effort and pay.
- Quiet cracking — Burnout without exit
- Persistent disengagement without people leaving — riskier to a company than visible churn.
- Onboarding vs orientation — Different scopes
- Orientation is the day-one paperwork; onboarding is the 90-day system that makes someone productive.
- L&D — Learning & Development
- The HR function responsible for skill-building, manager training, and career growth programs.
- 70-20-10 — Learning ratio
- Roughly: 70% from on-the-job, 20% from coaching/feedback, 10% from formal training. A useful budgeting heuristic.
- Skills-based hiring — Hire on demonstrated skills
- Selecting on assessed skills and work samples rather than degrees and titles. Demands more rigorous assessment design.
- Internal mobility — Career moves inside
- Moves across teams or roles within the same company. Strong internal mobility is one of the best retention levers.
- Employee lifecycle — Attract → alumni
- The arc from attraction through hiring, onboarding, development, performance, retention, exit, and alumni.
- Total rewards — Beyond cash
- Base, bonus, equity, benefits, time-off, learning budget, growth opportunity — everything an employee receives.
- Hiring funnel — Stage-by-stage pipeline
- Sourced → screened → interviewed → offered → hired. Conversion rates between stages reveal where your process is broken.
- Time-to-fill vs time-to-hire — Different clocks
- Time-to-fill is from req-open to start-date; time-to-hire is from application to accepted offer. Track both.
- Attrition vs turnover — Slightly different
- Often used interchangeably. Distinguish regrettable vs non-regrettable, and voluntary vs involuntary, when reporting.
- Manager enablement — Tools and training for managers
- The systems and content that make managers effective at hiring, feedback, performance, and growth conversations.
- Compensation philosophy — How you decide pay
- A written stance on market percentile, transparency, location, equity mix, and review cadence.
- Pay equity audit — Same role, same pay
- A statistical review of pay differences for similar roles, controlling for level and tenure, to find and close unjustifiable gaps.
- Severance — Pay on exit
- Compensation paid to departing employees, often in exchange for a release. Norms vary widely by country and seniority.
- Org design — How teams and reporting are shaped
- Choices about teams, layers, spans, and reporting lines — what work gets done by whom.
- Succession planning — Who could step up
- A regular review of who would cover or replace key roles, and what gaps exist in the bench.
- Stay interview — Why are you still here?
- A short 1:1 to understand what keeps a strong performer engaged, before they’re considering leaving.
- People analytics — Data about people decisions
- Using data to inform hiring, performance, retention, and org design. Most teams should start with 10–12 clean metrics, not 100.
- HCM — Human Capital Management
- A broader category than HRIS — adds talent, performance, learning, and sometimes payroll modules. Examples: Workday HCM, Oracle HCM, SAP SuccessFactors. In practice, the HRIS/HCM line is mostly marketing.
- EOR — Employer of Record
- A third party that legally employs your worker in a country where you have no entity. Lets you hire globally without incorporating. Examples: Deel, Remote, Oyster.
- PEO — Professional Employer Organization
- US co-employment model: the PEO is co-employer for tax, benefits, and HR while you direct the work. Examples: Justworks, TriNet, Insperity, Sequoia One.
- SOR — System of Record
- The one system where a piece of data is authoritative. In HR, the SOR is usually the HRIS — every other tool reads from it.
- Payroll tax — Tax on wages
- Statutory taxes on wages paid by employer and/or employee — federal/state/local income tax, social contributions (FICA in US, NI in UK), unemployment insurance. Employer-side payroll taxes typically add 7–15% to wage cost.
- DPIA — Data Protection Impact Assessment
- A required GDPR assessment when processing personal data is high-risk — including most HR analytics and AI use cases. Documents the risk, mitigations, and lawful basis.
- Disparate impact — Adverse effect on a protected group
- A legal test (US Title VII) where a neutral practice statistically disadvantages a protected class. Increasingly applied to AI hiring tools and audited under NYC Local Law 144.
- SOC 2 — Security controls audit
- An independent audit (Type I or Type II) of a vendor’s security, availability, and privacy controls. Type II covers an operating period (typically 6–12 months) and is the modern baseline for HR vendors.
- SSO / SCIM — Identity standards
- SSO (SAML/OIDC) lets employees sign in with one identity. SCIM automates user provisioning and deprovisioning from the HRIS. Together they’re the floor for any HR tool at scale.
- ATS funnel metrics — Stage-by-stage conversion
- Pass-through rate, time-in-stage, source-to-hire, offer-accept, and diversity at each stage. Together they tell you where the hiring process is breaking.
- Total cost of ownership — TCO
- License + implementation + integrations + admin headcount + add-ons over the contract term. Usually 1.5–3× the headline license price for non-trivial HR tools.