Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
The software an employer uses to receive, store, search, and move job applications through their hiring process.
46 terms
The job search, defined.
Hiring runs on vocabulary nobody explains to the person being hired. Here is the whole vocabulary, in plain English, with the part that actually changes what you should do.
Applications
Application tracker
A single record of every role you applied to, with its date, stage, contact, and next action — the job seeker's side of an ATS.
Cover letter
A short letter accompanying your resume that explains why this specific role and this specific company, in a voice a resume can't carry.
Follow-up
A short, timed message that re-surfaces your application or interview to the person deciding, without asking them to do work.
Ghosting
When an employer stops responding at any stage of a hiring process without ever declining you.
Knockout question
An application question whose wrong answer removes you from consideration automatically, before any human review.
Resume parsing
The automated step that converts your uploaded resume file into structured fields — name, roles, dates, skills — inside an employer's hiring system.
Resumes & CVs
Career gap
A period without formal employment on your work history — normal, common, and mostly a problem only when it's left unexplained.
CV vs resume
The same document in most of the world, and two different documents in the United States — where a CV is an exhaustive academic record and a resume is a one- to two-page summary.
Europass CV
The European Union's standardized CV format, expected by some public-sector and EU-institution employers and unnecessary almost everywhere else.
Keyword optimization
Using the employer's own vocabulary for skills and tools you genuinely have, so you appear in the searches a recruiter runs.
Master resume
A complete, unedited record of everything you've done, kept privately as the source you cut every real resume down from.
PDF vs DOCX
PDF preserves your layout everywhere and is the right default; DOCX is only better when the employer or agency explicitly asks for an editable file.
Quantified achievement
A resume bullet that states what changed and by how much, rather than what you were responsible for.
Resume summary
Two or three lines at the top of a resume stating what you do, at what level, and what you're aiming at.
Resume tailoring
Rewriting an existing resume for one specific posting so the relevant experience is the visible experience.
Reverse-chronological resume
The standard resume format, listing roles newest first — the layout recruiters and parsers both expect.
Job search
Boolean search
Searching with AND, OR, NOT and quoted phrases to control exactly which postings — or candidates — a query returns.
Employee referral
An internal recommendation from someone at the company, which routes your application to a reviewed queue instead of the general pile.
Evergreen requisition
A permanently open posting used to collect candidates for a role the company hires continuously — or isn't hiring for right now at all.
Informational interview
A short, low-stakes conversation with someone doing the work you want, asked for as research rather than as a job request.
Job board
A site that lists openings from many employers — either posted directly by them or scraped and aggregated from their careers pages.
Job posting
The employer's public description of a role — part specification, part marketing, and rarely a literal list of requirements.
Job search automation
Delegating the repetitive parts of a job hunt — searching, deduplicating, screening, drafting — to software, while keeping the judgment calls yourself.
Pipeline
All the opportunities you have in progress at once, seen as a funnel from application through offer.
Remote, hybrid, and onsite
The three work models employers post, distinguished by how many days you're required in an office and from where you're allowed to work.
Scheduled search
A saved set of search criteria that runs on a schedule and reports only what's new since the last run.
Hiring & recruiting
Hiring manager
The person the role reports to — who owns the requisition, makes the decision, and is the only interviewer whose "yes" is close to sufficient.
Interview loop
The set of interviews a company runs to make a decision — typically three to six sessions, each assigned a different signal to evaluate.
Job level
An employer's internal grade for a role, which sets the salary band, the scope expected, and often the interview bar — and which doesn't transfer between companies.
Recruiter screen
The first conversation in most hiring processes — a 20–30 minute call confirming basics and deciding whether to pass you to the hiring manager.
Reference check
Calls to your former colleagues near the end of a process, usually to confirm what you've already said rather than to discover something new.
Skills gap
The difference between what a posting asks for and what you can currently demonstrate — most of which is smaller than it looks.
Offers & pay
Compensation band
The internal minimum-to-maximum salary an employer has approved for a given level and location, from which every offer at that level is drawn.
Competing offer
A second live offer, which is the strongest and most honest source of leverage in a compensation conversation.
Notice period
The time you're contractually required to keep working after resigning — two weeks by convention in the US, one to three months by contract in much of Europe.
Offer letter
The written document stating the terms of employment — and the only version of the offer that binds anyone.
Salary range
The published minimum and maximum for a role — increasingly required by law, and usually wider than the band the employer will actually use.
Searching while employed
Running a job search without your current employer finding out — which mostly comes down to controlling signals rather than keeping secrets.
Total compensation
Everything an offer is worth in a year — base salary plus bonus, equity, and benefits — rather than the headline salary alone.
Vesting and the cliff
The schedule on which granted equity actually becomes yours — commonly four years, with nothing vesting until a one-year cliff is passed.
AI & automation
AI resume builder
A tool that drafts or rewrites resume content with a language model, ideally by reweighting facts you supplied rather than inventing new ones.
AI screening
Employer-side use of models to rank, summarize, or interview applicants before a recruiter reviews them.
JobPosting structured data
Machine-readable markup employers add to a posting so search engines and aggregators can read its title, location, salary, and dates directly.
Match score
A rating of how well one candidate profile fits one job posting, used to rank a long list of openings before a human reads any of them.
Prompt injection (in resumes)
Hiding instructions in a resume — white text, zero-size fonts, off-page content — meant to manipulate an AI screening tool into recommending you.
Knowing the words is the easy part.
Jobiz does the rest: every board in one list, each posting scored against your real profile, and tailored documents you review before anything is sent.