- Contingency search
- The recruiter is paid only on a successful hire. No fee if the client hires someone else or nobody. Fast to start, no exclusivity, and the recruiter carries all the risk — which is why contingency work gets deprioritized the moment a retained mandate lands.
- Retained and container search
- Retained: the client pays in scheduled installments — typically an engagement fee up front, one at shortlist, one at placement — for an exclusive, dedicated search. Container (engaged) search is the hybrid: a smaller up-front fee to buy commitment, with the balance contingent on placement.
- Placement fee percentage
- The direct-hire fee, quoted as a percentage of the candidate's first-year compensation. What counts as compensation — base only, or base plus signing bonus, target bonus and equity — is negotiated and materially changes the invoice.
- Guarantee period and fallback
- If the placed candidate leaves or is terminated inside the guarantee window, the firm either refunds part of the fee or replaces the candidate at no charge. Fallback (replacement) is the firm's preference; a prorated refund is the client's. Read which one the agreement actually promises.
- Exclusivity
- A commitment that only one firm works the req for a defined window. Buys the recruiter the confidence to invest real sourcing hours, and buys the client a single accountable owner instead of four firms racing to submit the same three resumes.
- Off-limits (hands-off) agreement
- A contractual promise not to recruit out of the client's own organization for a defined period. Its scope — whole company or named business unit, one year or perpetual — is the quiet reason a search firm may decline a competitor's mandate.
- Candidate ownership and right of representation
- Which firm owns the introduction, for how long, and what constitutes a valid submittal. Usually resolved by first written submission plus client acknowledgement, with an ownership period after which the claim lapses. The single most common source of fee disputes.
- Backdoor hire
- The client hires a candidate the agency introduced, but through another route or after the ownership window — sometimes accidentally, sometimes not. Agreements address it with submittal records, acknowledgement requirements and a defined ownership period.
- MSP and VMS
- A managed service provider runs a company's contingent workforce program; a vendor management system is the software the program runs on. Together they set rate cards, cap markups, control submission counts and rank suppliers by tier — which is how a boutique firm ends up submitting through a larger competitor.
- RPO
- Recruitment process outsourcing — the client rents a recruiting function rather than buying individual placements. Priced per recruiter, per hire or as a managed program. Enterprise RPO covers the whole function; project RPO covers one hiring surge.
- Direct hire
- Permanent placement onto the client's payroll, billed as a one-time fee. Distinct from contract work in risk, margin structure and how the recruiter's incentives run.
- Contract-to-hire
- The worker starts on the staffing firm's payroll for a trial period, then converts to the client's payroll. Lets both sides test fit, and lets a client hire against an opex budget when headcount is frozen.
- W-2, 1099 and corp-to-corp
- Three ways to engage a contractor. W-2 puts the worker on the staffing firm's payroll with taxes withheld. 1099 treats them as an independent contractor. Corp-to-corp contracts with the worker's own entity. The choice drives classification risk, benefits, rate expectations and who carries the liability.
- Markup and the bill-pay ratio
- Markup is what the staffing firm adds to the worker's pay rate to reach the client's bill rate, expressed as a percentage or as a bill-to-pay multiplier. It has to cover employer taxes, insurance, benefits, back office and profit — a markup that looks large is not the same as margin.
- Spread and gross margin per placement
- Spread is the dollar difference between bill rate and pay rate on a contract worker; gross margin is what remains after burden — employer taxes, workers' compensation, unemployment insurance, benefits. On direct hire the equivalent is the fee net of recruiter commission and sourcing cost.
- Conversion fee
- What the client pays to move a contractor onto its own payroll before the buyout schedule expires. Usually a declining scale — the longer the contract ran, the smaller the fee, often reaching zero after a defined number of hours worked.
- SOW services vs staff augmentation
- Staff augmentation supplies people who work under the client's direction. An SOW engagement sells a defined deliverable the vendor manages and is accountable for. Buyers increasingly reclassify work as SOW to move it outside contingent-labor caps — with real consequences for control, pricing and classification.
- Co-employment risk
- When a client exercises enough day-to-day control over a staffing firm's worker that both parties may be treated as employers. Exposure runs to benefits eligibility, discrimination claims and wage-hour liability. Managed by keeping supervision, discipline, tenure limits and benefits administration clearly on one side.
- Worker classification and the ABC test
- The legal question of whether someone is an employee or an independent contractor. Federal and state tests differ; the strict ABC test used in California and several other states presumes employee status unless the hiring entity proves the worker is free from control, performs work outside the usual course of business, and is independently established. Misclassification exposure includes back taxes, penalties and wage claims.
- EEOC and disparate impact
- The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforces federal anti-discrimination law in hiring. Disparate impact is the doctrine covering a facially neutral practice — a screening test, a degree requirement, an algorithm — that disproportionately excludes a protected group and cannot be shown to be job-related and consistent with business necessity.
- OFCCP obligations for federal contractors
- The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs enforces the equal-opportunity requirements that attach to federal contracts, including applicant recordkeeping, outreach and audit readiness. If a client is a covered contractor, its recruiting vendors inherit real documentation duties.
- Ban-the-box and salary history bans
- Two families of state and local law that remove questions from the front of the process — criminal-history checkboxes on applications, and asking a candidate what they currently earn. Both vary by jurisdiction and both apply to agencies and recruiters, not only to the employer of record.
- Pay transparency laws
- State and city statutes requiring a good-faith pay range in job postings, now in force across a growing set of jurisdictions including Colorado, California, New York, Washington, Illinois, Minnesota, Vermont, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Multi-state remote postings usually mean complying with the strictest applicable rule.
- I-9 and E-Verify
- Form I-9 documents identity and work authorization for every US hire, with strict timing rules. E-Verify checks that data against federal records — voluntary federally, mandatory for federal contractors and for employers in a number of states including Texas public employers.
- H-1B and cap-exempt employers
- The specialty-occupation visa most technical hires abroad depend on, allocated by an annual numerical cap through a registration and selection process. Universities, affiliated nonprofits and qualifying research organizations are cap-exempt and can petition year-round — the reason a candidate stuck in the lottery may be hireable by a hospital or university employer.
- O-1 and TN
- Two alternatives to H-1B. O-1 covers individuals with extraordinary ability, evidenced through awards, publications, press, judging and critical roles — increasingly used by senior engineers and founders. TN is the USMCA category available to Canadian and Mexican citizens in listed professions, renewable and comparatively fast.
- PERM and the employment green card
- The labor certification process for permanent residence, requiring the employer to test the US labor market with prescribed recruitment steps and prove no qualified, willing US worker was available at the prevailing wage. Long, document-heavy, and a real cost line the hiring manager should know about before promising sponsorship.
- Adverse action and the FCRA
- When a background check contributes to a decision not to hire, the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires standalone disclosure and authorization up front, then a pre-adverse-action notice with a copy of the report and a summary of rights, a reasonable waiting period, and a final adverse-action notice. Procedural shortcuts here are a favorite target of class litigation.
- AI hiring tools and bias audits
- Automated screening, ranking and video-interview tools now sit under a growing compliance layer — New York City's Local Law 144 requires an annual independent bias audit and published results plus candidate notice for automated employment decision tools, and Illinois and Colorado have enacted their own AI-in-employment obligations. The underlying anti-discrimination exposure exists with or without a specific AI statute.
- Req and intake meeting
- The req is the approved open position — the unit everything is measured against. The intake meeting is the conversation with the hiring manager that turns it into a real search: must-haves vs nice-to-haves, target companies, the comp band, the interview loop, the decision timeline and who signs off.
- Scorecard
- A written definition of the outcomes and competencies the hire must deliver, agreed before interviews start, used by every interviewer to rate against the same criteria. Converts 'I liked them' into evidence, and is also the artifact that defends a hiring decision later.
- Structured interview
- Every candidate gets the same questions in the same order, rated on the same anchored scale. Consistently outperforms unstructured conversation on predictive validity and dramatically narrows the room for bias.
- Take-home and system design interview
- The take-home is an offline project sized to a few hours, evaluated against a rubric. The system design interview asks a candidate to architect a system aloud — the standard senior-engineering signal, and the one most sensitive to interviewer calibration.
- Leveling and comp bands
- The internal ladder — L3, L4, L5 or equivalent — that maps scope and expected impact to a salary range. Getting the level wrong is the most common cause of a blown offer: the candidate is benchmarked against the wrong band from the first conversation.
- Total comp and equity refresh
- Base plus bonus plus equity, evaluated together. Equity refresh is the additional grant issued to existing employees to keep them whole as the original grant vests — the number that decides whether an offer actually beats what the candidate walks away from.
- Offer accept rate
- Offers accepted divided by offers extended. A falling rate usually means comp is off band, the process took too long, or the closing conversation is happening after the decision rather than before it.
- Time to fill and time to hire
- Time to fill counts from req approval to offer acceptance and measures the whole process including approvals. Time to hire counts from the candidate entering the pipeline to acceptance and measures the recruiting engine. Reporting one and calling it the other hides where the delay actually is.
- Cost per hire
- Total internal and external recruiting spend divided by hires in the period — agency fees, job board and tooling spend, recruiter compensation, referral bonuses, travel. The number executives use to justify moving work in-house, and the one most often calculated inconsistently.
- Sourcing channel mix
- Where hires actually originate — referrals, inbound applications, outbound sourcing, agencies, events, boomerangs. Tracked by hires and not by applications, because the channel producing the most volume is rarely the channel producing the most hires.
- Pipeline conversion
- Yield at each stage — submit-to-interview, interview-to-onsite, onsite-to-offer, offer-to-accept. A weak submit-to-interview ratio means the search is mistargeted; a weak interview-to-offer ratio means the bar or the loop is the problem. The ratios locate the failure that an aggregate time-to-fill number hides.
- Quality of hire and 90-day attrition
- Whether the hire worked — measured through ramp time, first performance review, hiring-manager satisfaction and retention. Early attrition inside the first 90 days is the bluntest version, and the one that triggers guarantee and fallback clauses.
- Boomerang
- A former employee rehired later. Boomerangs and silver medalists — finalists who lost a prior search — are the cheapest, fastest-converting pipeline most companies never systematically maintain.
- Employer brand and EVP
- Employer brand is the reputation a company has as a place to work. The employee value proposition is the deliberate articulation of what it offers in exchange for a career — work, growth, comp, culture, flexibility. Weak EVP shows up as low outbound reply rates long before it shows up in offer declines.
- Talent pool and nurture
- A maintained set of known, pre-qualified candidates kept warm with periodic relevant contact so the next req starts with a warm shortlist instead of a cold search. Requires a CRM and a content cadence, and is the main structural advantage a specialized firm holds over a generalist.
- ATS and CRM hygiene
- The applicant tracking system is the system of record for candidates against reqs; the recruiting CRM manages relationships before a req exists. Duplicate records, stale dispositions and missing source data quietly destroy every metric downstream — and unlogged dispositions are also what breaks an EEO or OFCCP audit.
- Boolean sourcing and the passive candidate
- Constructing search strings with AND, OR, NOT and proximity operators across LinkedIn, GitHub, job boards and X-ray searches of the open web to find people who are not applying. Most strong technical hires are passive — they are found, contacted and persuaded, not screened out of an inbound pile.