Hiring Glossary

Browse 42 hiring terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

42 Hiring Terms

10x Culture
10x Culture refers to a workplace environment that celebrates and rewards the idea of exceptionally productive individual contributors, often at the expense of...
10x Developer
10x Developer is a widely debated concept in software engineering suggesting that the best programmers can be an order of magnitude more productive than...
10x Developer Myth
10x Developer Myth refers to the skeptical perspective that the idea of developers who are ten times more productive than average is largely a myth or at least...
Acquihire
An acquisition done primarily to hire a startup's team rather than to keep its product or revenue stream. The product may be shut down while the talent is...
Candidate Experience
The overall experience a job candidate has during the hiring process, including communication, interviews, scheduling, feedback, and respect for their time. In...
Code Challenge
A programming task used for hiring, practice, education, or competition. In culture, code challenges are both a learning tool and a source of debate about...
Code Interview
An interview focused on coding ability, problem solving, debugging, or code discussion. In tech culture code interviews are widely used and equally widely...
Coding Interview
An interview that assesses coding skill through live exercises, take-home tasks, debugging, or code discussion. In developer culture coding interviews are both...
Cultural Fit
The degree to which a person seems compatible with a team's norms, working style, and values. In hiring culture the phrase is controversial because it can...
Culture Add
A hiring idea that emphasizes bringing in people who add new strengths, perspectives, or healthy challenge to a culture rather than merely fitting what is...
Culture Fit
A judgment about whether someone seems likely to fit comfortably within an existing team or organization. While sometimes useful for discussing work-style...
Employee Option Pool
A reserved set of company shares or options intended for current and future employees, usually to support hiring and retention. Option-pool size is a major...
Employer Brand
How a company is perceived as a place to work, including its reputation, mission, culture, and employee experience. Strong employer brand can materially...
Headcount
The number of people employed or planned within a company, team, or function. Headcount planning is central to startup budgeting because people costs dominate...
Hiring Pipeline
The sequence of stages candidates move through during recruiting, such as sourcing, screening, interviews, debriefs, and offers. Teams treat it like an...
Homework
Work assigned outside live interview time, often as a take-home coding task, design exercise, or written prompt in a hiring process. In tech culture the term...
Interview Cake Walk
A surprisingly easy interview process or coding round relative to the candidate's expectations.
Job Hopping Tech
The pattern of moving between tech jobs frequently, often for compensation growth, title changes, or better opportunities.
Job Title Inflation
The tendency for titles to become grander over time without a matching increase in scope or responsibility.
Junior Dev Hell
The frustrating state where entry-level developers struggle to get experience because even junior roles demand prior experience.
LeetCode
LeetCode is an online platform that hosts a collection of coding challenges designed to help software engineers practice algorithmic problem-solving and...
Leetcode Grind
The repetitive practice of solving algorithm problems, often on LeetCode, specifically to prepare for technical interviews. The phrase usually implies...
Option Pool
The reserved set of shares or options available for employee and advisor grants. Option-pool sizing is a recurring negotiation point because expanding it...
OTE
On-target earnings, the total compensation a salesperson is expected to make if they hit quota, usually combining base salary and variable commission. OTE is a...
Phone Screen
An early-stage interview, traditionally by phone and now often by video, used to assess basic fit, communication, and sometimes technical baseline before more...
Purple Squirrel
A recruiting term for an unrealistically perfect candidate who matches every desired skill, background, and experience requirement. It is usually used...
Ramp Period
The time it takes for a new hire, team, product, or initiative to reach expected productivity or performance levels. Ramp periods matter especially in sales...
Recruiter Spam
Low-quality, high-volume outreach from recruiters that is generic, poorly targeted, or clearly based on shallow keyword matching. Developers often use the...
Rehire
To bring back a former employee into the company, often because they already understand the product, culture, and context. Rehires can ramp faster, though...
Resume Padding
The practice of exaggerating experience, inflating responsibilities, or listing shallow familiarity as if it were substantial expertise on a resume. In hiring...
Reverse Interview
The part of a hiring process where the candidate questions the company, team, manager, or role rather than only being evaluated themselves. Strong candidates...
Rock Star Developer
A flashy and often criticized label for a supposedly exceptional developer who delivers outsized impact. In practice, the phrase is associated with immature...
Salary Transparency
The practice of making compensation ranges or actual pay visible to employees, candidates, or the public instead of treating them as private or opaque. In...
Tech Interview
An interview process or round designed to evaluate technical ability, reasoning, design judgment, or engineering experience. In tech culture, the phrase often...
Tech Interview Gauntlet
A long or exhausting hiring process with many rounds, formats, and evaluators that candidates must survive.
Technical Interview
A job interview evaluating coding skills, typically through whiteboard problems, system design questions, or take-home projects. The interview format where...
Turnover
The rate at which employees leave and are replaced, though in some regions and industries the term can also refer to revenue. In startup people operations,...
Unicorn Developer
A hypothetical engineer with an unrealistically broad set of elite skills across many areas, often used to criticize impossible job descriptions. Sometimes it...
Unicorn Employee
A job candidate who meets every item on an impossibly long requirements list — 10 years of experience in a 3-year-old technology, fluent in 7 languages, PhD...
Unicorn Hire
A rare hire who is seen as combining unusually strong technical skill, domain fit, communication ability, and leadership potential in one person. The phrase...
Warm Body
A dismissive term for a person treated as interchangeable staffing rather than as a skilled contributor, often used critically about poor hiring or management...
Whiteboard Interview
A job interview format where candidates solve or discuss problems on a whiteboard. In engineering slang, whiteboard interviews remain controversial because...

Related Topics