Recruitment

How to spell recruitment

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce recruitment

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recruitment mean?

1. nounThe process of finding, attracting, and taking on new members or employees.

Recruitment in a sentence

• The company outsourced its recruitment to a specialist agency.

• A hiring freeze halted all recruitment until the next budget cycle.

Where does recruitment come from?

Language of origin: French

Recruitment traces back through French to the Latin verb crescere, which meant 'to grow' or 'to increase'. From it French formed recrue, literally 'a fresh growth' or 'new shoot', a term soldiers borrowed to describe the new levy of men brought in to swell an army's ranks. The verb recruit entered English in the early 1600s with exactly this military sense of replenishing depleted forces, and the noun recruitment followed, naming the act of raising those new troops. Over the centuries the word spread out of the barracks and into ordinary working life, so today it most often describes companies hiring staff. The same crescere root still shows up in the everyday words 'increase', 'crescent', and 'crescendo', a reminder that recruitment is at heart about growing a group; the spelling trap is the silent middle, since the '-cruit-' is pronounced 'croot' and the '-ment' is unstressed.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• cruit (from French recrue 'fresh growth, new levy', ultimately Latin crescere 'to grow')
• -ment (noun suffix)