- Baseline
- The normal level of a signal for a given company and role family, against which a spike or drop is measured. Without a baseline you cannot distinguish a meaningful deviation from routine churn, so it is the prerequisite for any honest read.
- Broker
- A person who sits between otherwise disconnected clusters in the people-graph and through whom talent, capital, and deal flow cross from one group to another. Brokers are disproportionately important because their moves can rewire a corner of the market.
- Convergence threshold
- The discipline of requiring several independent signals, across hiring, talent flow, and network structure, to point the same way before treating a read as actionable: one signal is a question, two a hypothesis, three a conclusion.
- Hiring velocity
- The rate at which a company posts new roles and how tightly those postings cluster by location, function, and seniority, as distinct from the steady background level of open roles. Bursts, not levels, carry timing and location information.
- People-graph
- A map of individuals as nodes and their relationships as edges, including former colleagues, co-founders, shared board seats, and investor ties. Deals and hires travel along these durable edges, making the graph a forecasting tool.
- Role signature
- The characteristic set of specialized functions a given kind of project must staff, whose composition and sequence date a project's maturity, from early land-and-interconnection roles to late commissioning and operations roles.
- Talent flow
- The movement of specialized people between employers, read as intelligence. Because it captures decisions at the moment they are made rather than announced, the direction and composition of flows map where capability and advantage are shifting.
- Team lift-out
- The coordinated hiring of a whole working group out of one employer into another. Because it takes capital and conviction to move an intact team with its playbook and relationships, a lift-out marks a deliberate, well-funded attempt to compete.