For some reason, there are a lot of Microspeak terms related to personnel. (Maybe you folks can tell me how common these terms are outside Microsoft.) <\/p>\n
We start with a term that is not actually used much outside the personnel world: The Position Control Number<\/i>, or PCN. The PCN represents a place where an employee could be hired. If somebody is actually hired for the position, then the PCN is filled<\/i>; if not, then it is unfilled<\/i>. <\/p>\n
The term you are likely to hear outside of the personnel world is headcount<\/i>. (Pronounced as the two words head count<\/i>, accent on the first word.) This is a filled PCN, and it is often abbreviated to just head<\/i>. <\/p>\n
Another term you are likely to hear is a req<\/i>, short for requisition<\/i>, and pronounced like the word wreck<\/i>. A req is a requisition to recruit; in other words, it is permission to look for somebody to fill a position. <\/p>\n We have an open req to find somebody to frob the whatsit so it can futz the doodad. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n An open req<\/i> is a req that has not yet been filled. This sounds redundant to me, because a req by definition is unfilled, isn’t it? <\/p>\n Yet another personnel term you may encounter is backfill<\/i>. This refers to hiring someone to take over a position that has been vacated by somebody who left the team. You will sometimes hear the term used in a metaphorical context. <\/p>\n Who is the backfill for Bob while he is on vacation? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Bob has not actually left the team; the person merely wants to know who is covering Bob’s responsibilities while he is on vacation. <\/p>\n The last term I’m going to expose you to is the ROP<\/i>, or Recruiting Only Position<\/i>. A ROP is permission to interview someone for a position that doesn’t exist yet. You open a ROP with a particular person in mind, and once obtained, you have permission to interview them. You can think of a ROP as unapproved headcount, since if you decide to hire the person, you still have to find a PCN to put them in. And if you decide not to hire the person after you interviewed them, you close the ROP. <\/p>\n I have no idea how useful these terms are for people not in the personnel world, but I figured I’d write them down for my own benefit, so I have something to refer to when I run across them. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jargon from the personnel side of the business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[105,26],"class_list":["post-44453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-microspeak","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":" Jargon from the personnel side of the business.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}