Appendix A

Glossary

Term	Definition
Adverse impact	A substantially different rate of selection that works to the disadvantage of a group. Also called disparate impact.
Agent	An AI system that takes actions through tools, often over several steps.
Applicant tracking system (ATS)	Software for managing job openings and candidates.
Augment	A mode of use in which AI drafts or analyses and a person reviews and decides.
Automated decision system / tool	Legal terms (with varying definitions) for software that makes or substantially assists decisions about people.
Automation bias	The tendency to over-trust automated output.
Baseline	The value of a measure before a change, used for comparison.
Bias audit	A test of whether a tool’s outcomes differ across demographic groups.
Chatbot	Software that converses with users, by script or by language model.
Containment rate	Share of assistant conversations resolved without handoff to a person.
Context window	The amount of text a model can consider at once.
Data protection impact assessment (DPIA)	A documented assessment of privacy risks, required under GDPR-style laws for high-risk processing.
Deployer	Under the EU AI Act, an organisation that uses an AI system (as distinct from the provider that develops it).
eNPS	Employee Net Promoter Score: % promoters minus % detractors.
Few-shot prompting	Including examples in a prompt for the model to imitate.
Four-fifths rule	A rule of thumb: an impact ratio below 0.80 indicates possible adverse impact.
Generative AI	AI that produces new content such as text or images.
Grounding	Supplying source material and instructing the model to answer only from it.
Hallucination	Fluent output that is false or unsupported.
Hiring manager	The manager to whom a new hire will report.
HRBP	HR business partner: an HR adviser assigned to a business unit.
HRIS	Human resources information system: the system of record for employee data.
Human in the loop	A person reviews, approves or can stop an automated process.
Impact ratio	One group’s selection rate divided by the highest group’s selection rate.
Instructions (system prompt)	Standing directions an assistant follows in every conversation.

Term	Definition
KPI	Key performance indicator.
Large language model (LLM)	A model trained on large amounts of text to generate language.
Onboarding	The process of integrating a new hire, typically over 90 days.
Personal data	Information relating to an identifiable person.
Prompt	The input given to a model.
Proxy	A variable that stands in for a protected characteristic, such as postcode for race.
Regression testing	Re-running a full test set after any change.
Requisition	An approved request to fill a position.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)	Finding relevant passages in documents and supplying them to the model to answer from.
Selection rate	Number selected divided by number who applied, for a group.
Task (Zapier)	A successfully completed action, counted for billing.
Thematic analysis	Grouping qualitative comments into themes.
Token	The unit of text a model processes.
Trigger	The event that starts an automation.
Turnover rate	Separations divided by average headcount, as a percentage.
Voice card	A short description of an organisation’s writing style, used in prompts.
Voicebot	A conversational AI system that works by speech.
Zap	An automated workflow in Zapier.