Glossary
This page defines the key terms and concepts used throughout Illumera and this documentation. Terms are grouped by theme. For a deeper narrative explanation of how these pieces fit together, see Platform Concepts.
New to Illumera? Read Getting Started first, then use this glossary as a reference whenever you hit an unfamiliar term.
Platform Structure
Tenant
An isolated organizational boundary within Illumera. Each tenant has its own users, data, and configuration. Data does not leak across tenants, which is what allows competing contractors to operate on the same platform safely. Platform administrators manage tenants across the entire deployment.
Profile
The record that represents an entity in the network. There are two kinds:
- Person profile — an individual professional (consultant, contractor, specialist) with skills, certifications, availability, seniority, and a target rate.
- Company profile — a contracting organization with industry, size, headquarters, and a roster of people (its bench).
Federated network
The cross-organization model that lets talent be sourced from your own organization, from partner companies on the platform, or from independent professionals — all scored by the same engine on a level playing field. "Federated" means the network spans many organizations while each retains control of its own data and visibility.
Marketplace
The searchable surface where companies discover talent and talent discovers open work. The marketplace applies match scoring and visibility rules so each viewer sees only what they are permitted to see.
Bench
A company's roster of people available for staffing — its internal talent pool. Bench members can be allocated to project slots or surfaced (subject to visibility settings) to partner organizations.
Jobsite
The physical or designated work location associated with a project or engagement. Used alongside work-mode and travel preferences to evaluate on-site, hybrid, and remote fit.
Work & Engagements
Project
A unit of work posted by a company. A project groups together one or more slots, along with shared context such as the customer, domain, timeline, and jobsite.
Slot
A single staffing position within a project. A slot defines required skills, proficiency levels, seniority, availability needs, budget ceiling, and culture/work-environment preferences. Candidates are scored against individual slots.
Engagement
The relationship between a person and a slot once work is initiated. An engagement carries the full history of the placement — from invitation through completion — including notifications and audit trail.
Engagement lifecycle
The defined stages an engagement moves through:
| Stage | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Invited | A company has invited a candidate to a slot (or a candidate has expressed interest). |
| Proposed / Pending | Terms are under review; the placement is not yet confirmed. |
| Active | The engagement is confirmed and work is underway. |
| Completed | Work has finished successfully. |
| Declined / Cancelled | The engagement ended before becoming active. |
SOW (Statement of Work)
A document defining the scope, deliverables, timeline, and terms of an engagement or project.
WEP (Work Environment Preferences)
The set of preferences — work mode (on-site / hybrid / remote), travel tolerance, clearance level, and schedule — used to apply constraint penalties during culture-fit scoring. A poor WEP match reduces the culture-fit score even when archetype alignment is high.
Matching — The Spider Score
Spider match score
Illumera's overall candidate-to-slot match score (0–100%), visualized as a radar ("spider") chart across six independent dimensions. It is explainable: each dimension contributes a visible 0–1 sub-score rather than a single opaque number. It is not a black-box LLM verdict — a deterministic baseline is computed first, and AI calibration only adjusts a subset of dimensions.
Skill match
The proficiency-weighted overlap between a person's skills and a slot's required skills.
Culture fit
Alignment between a person's work-style archetype and the slot/company reference archetype, computed from the CVF culture vector and adjusted by WEP constraint penalties.
Availability
The person's available hours per week measured against the slot's requirements.
Domain experience
Depth of specialization in the project's primary technology or mission domain. (Also referred to as domain depth.)
Cost efficiency
The person's target rate relative to the slot's budget ceiling.
Seniority
The candidate's seniority level relative to what the slot calls for. (Reflected in the experience dimension alongside domain depth.)
Capabilities, Skills & Certifications
Capability catalogue
The shared, standardized library of skills and certifications that everyone selects from. Using one catalogue eliminates ambiguity ("React" always means the same thing) and makes matching comparable across the whole network. The catalogue spans 1,153 skills, 369 certifications, and 1,217 cert↔skill correlations across 6 industries.
Skill
A discrete capability drawn from the catalogue (for example, a technology, method, or discipline). People self-rate proficiency on each skill; slots require skills at minimum proficiency levels.
Certification
A formal credential drawn from the catalogue. Certifications can imply or reinforce related skills via correlations.
Cert↔skill correlation
A defined relationship linking a certification to the skills it implies. When a person holds a certification, correlated skills can be inferred or weighted in matching — so a credential strengthens the relevant parts of a profile without manual re-entry.
Proficiency levels
The five-point self-rating scale applied to skills:
| Level | Description |
|---|---|
| Aware | Familiar with the concept and its use cases. |
| Beginner | Can apply with guidance; learning through practice. |
| Intermediate | Independent practical application. |
| Advanced | Deep applied knowledge; solves complex problems. |
| Expert | Recognized authority; designs systems and sets standards. |
Seniority levels
The six-level career scale used by profiles and slots: Junior, Mid, Senior, Lead, Principal, and Fellow.
The experience scoring engine does not yet have a dedicated rank entry for fellow; it
currently falls back to the mid-equivalent rank in match score computation.
Culture & Availability
CVF (Competing Values Framework)
A validated organizational-culture model used to measure work-environment alignment. Both people and companies complete a structured questionnaire that produces archetype scores.
Culture vector
The four-archetype representation of a person's or company's work style produced by the CVF questionnaire: Collaborative, Innovative, Results-Driven, and Structured. Vectors are compared with a weighted dot-product to produce the culture-fit score.
Availability states
The status that communicates whether a person can take on new work (for example, available, limited, or unavailable), combined with committed hours per week. Availability feeds the availability dimension of the Spider score.
Roles & Visibility
Role types
The access roles assigned to a user. A user may hold more than one.
| Role | Who it is for |
|---|---|
person | An individual professional using the Talent portal. |
company_admin | A user who administers a contracting company. |
company_member | A company user with standard (non-admin) access. |
platform_admin | Illumera staff managing tenants, users, and configuration. |
Visibility levels
The settings that control who can see a profile or its details across the federated network — for example, private, network/partner-visible, or marketplace-public. Visibility rules are enforced everywhere data is surfaced, including the marketplace.