Recruiting has a vocabulary problem: half the industry's terms sound interchangeable (sourcing? recruiting? talent acquisition?), and the other half are acronyms nobody stops to define. This glossary fixes that — 15 terms recruiters, hiring managers, and career changers actually search for, each with a plain-English definition first and the nuance after. Bookmark it, or jump straight to the term you need.

Quick Index

1. What Is Sourcing in Recruiting?

Sourcing is the proactive search for potential candidates before they apply — finding people who match a role's requirements, identifying how to reach them, and making the first contact. Where traditional recruiting waits for applications to arrive, sourcing goes out and finds the people who were never going to apply on their own.

In practice, sourcing means searching LinkedIn, GitHub, professional communities, and candidate databases; building lists of matching profiles; finding verified contact details; and sending the first outreach message. It's the top of the recruiting funnel — everything downstream (screening, interviews, offers) depends on the quality of the people sourced in. Modern AI sourcing tools compress much of this work: instead of building Boolean strings by hand, you describe the role in plain language and get a ranked list of matching profiles. For the manual craft, see our guides to candidate sourcing strategies and LinkedIn sourcing.

2. What Is a Sourcer?

A sourcer is a recruiting specialist who focuses exclusively on finding and engaging candidates — the top-of-funnel half of the recruiting job. Sourcers build searches, mine LinkedIn and niche communities, find contact data, and run first-touch outreach. Once a candidate responds and is interested, the sourcer typically hands them off to a recruiter who manages screening, interviews, and the offer.

Dedicated sourcers are common in larger talent teams and agencies where volume justifies the specialization; in smaller teams, one recruiter does both jobs. The role rewards search craft (Boolean search, platform knowledge, creative digging — think finding developers on GitHub) more than relationship management. It's also the recruiting role most reshaped by AI: tools that search across 297M+ public profiles from a plain-language description now do in minutes what a sourcer's morning used to look like.

3. Sourcing vs Recruiting: What's the Difference?

Sourcing finds candidates; recruiting hires them. Sourcing covers the search and first contact — identifying matching people, getting their attention, confirming interest. Recruiting covers the full lifecycle: qualifying candidates, coordinating interviews, managing feedback, negotiating offers, and closing the hire.

The distinction matters for how you staff and measure the work. Sourcing is measured on pipeline metrics (qualified candidates added, response rate to outreach); recruiting is measured on outcome metrics (hires, time to hire, offer acceptance rate). A team can be great at one and weak at the other — plenty of pipelines are full of well-sourced candidates who stall because nobody moves them through interviews quickly.

4. Talent Acquisition vs Recruitment: What's the Difference?

Recruitment fills open roles; talent acquisition is the ongoing strategy of building the workforce — employer branding, talent pipelines for future needs, workforce planning, and internal mobility, alongside the day-to-day filling of requisitions. Recruitment is reactive by nature (a role opens, you fill it); talent acquisition treats hiring as a continuous function that starts before roles open.

In small companies the terms are used interchangeably, and that's fine — one person does both. The distinction becomes real at scale: a talent acquisition team owns things a pure recruiting desk doesn't, like maintaining a talent pool of past and future candidates, tracking recruiting metrics across quarters, and shaping how the company presents itself to candidates.

5. What Is an ATS (Applicant Tracking System)?

An ATS is software that manages job applicants through the hiring process for specific open roles — collecting applications, parsing resumes, tracking each candidate's stage (applied, screened, interviewing, offer), and keeping the interview feedback and communication history in one place.

The ATS is built around the job requisition: a role opens, applicants flow in, the system tracks them until the role closes. That's also its limitation — a classic ATS only knows about people who applied. It doesn't help you find candidates who didn't, which is why sourcing-led teams pair an ATS with sourcing and outreach tooling, or use a platform that combines them. If you're choosing one, our ATS buyer's guide covers the decision, and CRM vs ATS explains what an ATS deliberately doesn't do.

6. What Is a Recruitment CRM?

A recruitment CRM (candidate relationship management system) manages long-term relationships with candidates and clients — people you might place someday, not just applicants to a current role. Where an ATS tracks applicants through a specific requisition, a CRM tracks relationships across time: past candidates worth re-engaging, silver-medalist finalists, client contacts, and the history of every touchpoint.

For agencies, the CRM is the business asset — the network of candidates and clients is what you sell. Agency-grade CRMs add client-side features too: deal tracking, submittals, and client reporting. The full comparison lives in CRM vs ATS: what's the difference?, and our recruiting CRM roundup ranks the options by agency size.

7. What Is a Candidate Pipeline?

A candidate pipeline is the set of candidates progressing through defined stages toward a hire for a specific role — typically something like sourced → contacted → replied → screening → interview → offer → hired. The pipeline view (usually a Kanban board) shows how many candidates sit at each stage and where they're getting stuck.

A healthy pipeline is measured by conversion between stages, not by raw volume — 200 sourced candidates mean little if 2% reply to outreach. Watching stage-to-stage conversion tells you exactly where to fix the process: a weak sourced→replied rate is an outreach quality problem, a weak interview→offer rate is a screening problem. Recruitment metrics & KPIs covers the numbers worth tracking at each stage.

8. What Is a Talent Pool?

A talent pool is a maintained database of potential candidates you haven't hired yet — past applicants, silver medalists who reached final rounds, sourced prospects who said "not now," referrals, and event contacts. Unlike a pipeline, which is tied to one open role and empties when the role closes, a talent pool persists and grows across roles.

The economics are the point: a candidate re-engaged from your pool costs a fraction of one sourced cold, and warm candidates convert better. The classic failure mode is treating the pool as a graveyard — profiles go in, nothing comes out. A working talent pool gets segmented (by skill, seniority, location) and periodically re-engaged, which is where outreach automation earns its keep.

9. What Is a Passive Candidate?

A passive candidate is someone who isn't actively job hunting but would consider the right opportunity. They're employed, not browsing job boards, and will never see your posting — the only way to reach them is proactive sourcing and direct outreach. Active candidates, by contrast, are applying, searching, and visible.

Passive candidates matter because they're most of the market — and often the strongest part of it: people who are good at their jobs tend to be employed and not looking. Recruiting them is a different game than processing applicants: the first message has to earn attention (see outreach templates that get replies), the pitch leads with the opportunity rather than the application process, and timelines run longer. Nearly everything on this site about LinkedIn sourcing and contact finding exists because passive candidates don't come to you.

Boolean search combines keywords with logical operators — AND, OR, NOT, quotes, and parentheses — to build precise candidate search queries. AND requires both terms, OR accepts either, NOT excludes, quotation marks lock an exact phrase, and parentheses group conditions. A typical string for a frontend role: (frontend OR "front-end") AND (React OR Vue OR Angular) AND Kyiv NOT recruiter.

Boolean is how sourcers wring precision out of LinkedIn, job boards, and Google (where "x-ray search" applies Boolean to site-specific queries like site:linkedin.com/in). It's a genuine craft with real depth — our Boolean search mastery guide goes operator by operator — though it's also the recruiting skill AI has automated furthest: natural-language search tools now generate and run these queries from a plain description of the role.

11. Time to Fill vs Time to Hire: What's the Difference?

Time to fill counts from the day a job requisition is approved to the day an offer is accepted; time to hire counts from the day a candidate enters your pipeline to offer acceptance. Time to fill includes everything before sourcing even starts (approvals, writing the posting); time to hire measures only the active recruiting of the person you hired.

They diagnose different problems. A long time to fill with a short time to hire means the process is slow to start — approvals and intake are the bottleneck, not recruiting. A long time to hire points at the funnel itself: slow screening, interview scheduling drag, or indecision. Industry-average time to hire runs around 36 days, while top-performing teams close in 14–18 — how to reduce time to hire breaks down where the days actually go, and the metrics guide shows the exact formulas.

12. What Is Headhunting (Executive Search)?

Headhunting — formally, executive search — is recruiting senior leaders by directly approaching specific individuals, usually ones who aren't looking. Instead of posting a role and screening applicants, a headhunter maps the market ("who are the 30 people who could run engineering at this company?"), researches each target, and approaches them confidentially.

It differs from standard recruiting on almost every axis: targets are passive by default, searches are often confidential (a company replacing an executive who doesn't know yet), engagements run 60–120 days rather than 30–45, and the work is usually retained rather than contingent. The tooling differs too — see our guide to executive search software.

13. Contingency vs Retained Recruiting: What's the Difference?

Contingency recruiters are paid only if their candidate is hired; retained recruiters are paid a committed fee — typically in installments starting up front — for an exclusive search. Contingency fees usually run 15–25% of first-year salary, paid on placement. Retained engagements split a similar total fee into thirds (start, shortlist, placement) and commit the firm to the search whether or not any single candidate lands.

The models create different incentives. Contingency rewards speed — several agencies may race on the same role, so submitting fast beats searching deep. Retained rewards thoroughness — the firm is exclusive and accountable, which is why executive searches are almost always retained. Most agencies start on contingency and add retained work as their reputation builds; how to start a recruitment agency covers choosing a model and setting fees.

14. What Is a Staffing Agency?

A staffing agency supplies workers to client companies — typically temporary, contract, or contract-to-hire staff who are employed by the agency and work at the client. That employment relationship is the defining feature: for temp and contract placements, the agency runs payroll, handles compliance, and bills the client an hourly markup.

"Staffing" and "recruiting" get used loosely, but the models differ: a recruitment agency finds permanent employees who go on the client's payroll, earning a one-time placement fee; a staffing agency keeps contractors on its own payroll and earns margin for the duration of every assignment. Many firms do both. Staffing runs on volume and speed of redeployment; permanent recruiting runs on placement quality and fees. The business mechanics — margins, cash flow, contracts — are covered in the agency startup guide.

15. What Is Candidate Experience?

Candidate experience is how candidates perceive every interaction with your hiring process — from the first outreach message or application form through interviews, communication cadence, and the offer or rejection. It's measured in practical terms: Did anyone reply? Did the process respect their time? Did rejection come with an answer or with silence?

It has hard consequences, not just soft ones. Candidates who are ghosted tell their networks; strong candidates drop out of slow processes and take faster offers; and for agencies, every candidate is also a potential future client. The highest-leverage fixes are unglamorous: respond to everyone (automated sequences make "no one falls through" achievable — see outreach automation), compress scheduling delays, and close the loop after every interview. A fast pipeline is itself a candidate experience feature — another reason reducing time to hire pays twice.

Put the Vocabulary to Work

Definitions are the entry ticket; the leverage is in the workflows behind them. If you're building a sourcing practice, start with the sourcing strategies guide and the Boolean deep-dive. If you're choosing systems, CRM vs ATS then the ATS buyer's guide. And if you'd rather skip the tool-stitching entirely: MindHunt AI combines AI candidate search across 297M+ profiles, verified contact enrichment, and automated email + Telegram outreach in one platform — the sourcing, pipeline, and outreach layers of this glossary, from $49/month.