HRM Vocabulary

Self-Service

Giving employees online access to, or apps that provide, information about HR issues such as training, benefits, compensation, and contracts; enrolling online in programs and services; and completing online attitude surveys.

Outsourcing

The practice of having another company (a vendor, third party, or consultant) provide services.

Disparate Treatment

Interntional discrimination toured employees. (race, age, gender)

Disparate Impact

Policies or practices that disproportionately disadvantage members of a protected class. (race, age, gender)

Furlough

A form of mandatory, temporary, and unpaid leave from work.

Evidence-Based HR

The demonstration that HR practices have a positive influence on the company’s bottom line or key stakeholders (employees, customers, community, shareholders). Requires the use of HR or workforce analytics.

HR or Workforce Analytics

The practice of using quantitative methods and scientific methods to analyze data (often big data) to understand the role of talent in executing the business strategy and achieving business goals.

Big Data

Information merged from HR databases, corporate financial statements, employee surveys, and other data sources to make evidence-based HR decisions and show that HR practices influence the organization’s bottom line, including profits and costs.

Sustainability

Refers to the company’s ability to meet its needs without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

Stakeholders

Refers to shareholders, the community, customers, employees, and all of the other parties that have an interest in seeing the company succeed.

STEM Skills

Refer to skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Digital Literacy

The skills needed to interpret, create, and strategically use digital information.

Knowledge Workers

Employees who contribute to the company not through manual labor, but through what they know, perhaps about customers or a specialized body of knowledge.

Reskilling

Training employees to acquire new knowledge or skills.

Upskilling

Training employees to improve or expand their current skills.

Intangible Assets

Include human capital, customer capital, social capital, and intellectual capital.

Empowering

Giving employees responsibility and authority to make decisions regarding all aspects of product development and customer service.

Learning Organization

Embraces a culture of lifelong learning, enabling all employees to continually acquire and share knowledge.

Employee Engagement

The degree to which employees are fully involved in their work and the strength of their commitment to their job and the company.

Employee Experience

Everything that influences employee’s daily life both inside and outside of the workplace.

Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

Strategic statement that communicates the company values, how they affect employees, and how the employee experience reflects the values.

Talent Management

The systematic effort by a company to use bundles of HRM practices - including acquiring and assessing employees, learning and development, performance management, and compensation - to attract, retain, develop, and motivate highly skilled employees and managers.

Nontraditional Employment

The use of independent contractors, freelancers, on-call workers, temporary workers, and company workers.

Gig Workers

Typically, independent contractors who control when and where they work and often are assigned work through a website or mobile app. (Uber, DoorDash)

Balanced Scorecard

Gives managers an indication of the performance of a company based on the degree to which stakeholders’ needs are satisfied; it depicts the company from the perspective of internal and external customers, employees, and shareholders.

Competing through Environmental, Social, and Governance Practices (SAP)

Box highlights how SAP helps people with autism spectrum obtain jobs that utilize their unique skills.

Total Quality Management (TQM)

A companywide effort to continuously improve the way people, machines, and systems accomplish work.

Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)

The government’s attempt to ensure that all individuals have an equal chance for employment, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, or national origin.

Competing Through Technology

Describes how new technology-based hiring assessments can be unfair to applicates with disabilities.

Centralization

The degree to which decision-making authority resides at the top of the organizational chart as opposed to being distributed throughout lower levels (in which case authority is decentralized).

Departmentalization

The degree to which work units are grouped based on functional similarity or similarity of workflow.

Work-Flow Design

The process of analyzing the tasks necessary for the production of a product or service, prior to allocating and assigning these tasks to a particular job category or person.

Organization Structure

The relatively stable and formal network of vertical and horizontal interconnections among jobs that constitute the organization.

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA)

Protects individuals with disabilities from being discriminated against in the workplace.

Malcom Baldrige National Quality Award

Created by public law, is the highest level of national recognition for quality that a U.S. company can receive.

Forecasting

The process of attempting to ascertain the supply and demand for various types of human resources.

Leading Indicator

An objective measure that accurately predicts future labor demand.

Transitional Matrix

A matrix showing the proportion or number of employees in different job categories at different times.

Downsizing

The planned elimination of large numbers of personnel, designed to enhance organizational effectiveness.

Offshoring

A special case of outsourcing, in which the jobs that move leave one country and go to another.

Workforce Utilization Review

A comparison of the proportion of workers in protected subgroups with the proportion that each subgroup represents in the relevant labor market.

Human Resource Recruitment

The practice or activity carried on by the organization with the primary purpose of identifying and attracting potential employees.

Due Process Policies

Policies by which a company formally lays out the steps an employee can take to appeal a termination decision.

Employment-at-will Policies

Policies stating that either an employer or an employee can terminate the employment relationship at any time, regardless of cause.

Direct Applicants

People who apply for a job vacancy without prompting from the organization.

Referrals

People who are prompted to apply for a job by someone within the organization.

Job Analysis

The process of getting detailed information about jobs.

Job Description

A list of the tasks, duties, and responsibilities (TDRs) that a job entails.

Job Specification

A list of the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) that an individual must have to perform a job.

Job Design

The process of defining the way work will be performed and the tasks that will be required in a given job.

Job Redesign

The process of changing the tasks or the way work is performed in an existing job.

Ergonomics

The interface between individuals’ physiological characteristics and the physical work environment.

Reliability

The consistency of a performance measure; the degree to which a performance measure is free from random error.

Validity

The extent to which a performance measure assesses all the relevant - and only the relevant - aspects of job performance.

Criterion-Related Validity

A method of establishing the validity of a personnel selection method by showing a substantial correlation between test scores and job-performance scores.

Predictive Validation

A criterion-related validity study that seeks to establish an empirical relationship between applicants’ test scores and their eventual performance on the job.

Concurrent Validation

A criterion-related validity study in which a test is administered to all the people currently in a job and then incumbents’ scores are correlated with existing measures of their performance on the job.

Content Validation

A test-validation strategy performed by demonstrating that the items, questions, or problems posed by a test are a representative sample of the kinds of situations or problems that occur on the job.

Utility

The degree to which the information provided by selection methods enhances the effectiveness of selecting personnel in real organizations.

Situational Interview

An interview procedure where applicants are confronted with specific issues, questions, or problems that are likely to arise on the job.

Cognitive Ability Tests

Tests that include three dimensions: verbal comprehension, quantitative ability, and reasoning ability.

Verbal Comprehension

Refers to a person’s capacity to understand and use written and spoken language.

Quantitative Ability

Refers to the speed and accuracy with which one can solve arithmetic problems of all kinds.

Reasoning Ability

Refers to a person’s capacity to invent solutions to many diverse problems.

Assessment Center

A process in which multiple raters evaluate employees’ performance on a number of exercises.