Whitepaper

Industry Vocabulary Testing: A Guide for HR

Published 22 September 2026

The federal Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures define knowledge in eleven words: "A body of information applied directly to the performance of a function."¹ Skills and abilities get separate definitions, each tied to observable behavior. The distinction matters to anyone testing editors for a specialized field, because a test of a field's vocabulary measures knowledge, and the Guidelines hold knowledge tests to their own standard.

Knowledge has its own standard in the Guidelines

The Guidelines ask that tested knowledge be "operationally defined as that body of learned information which is used in and is a necessary prerequisite for observable aspects of work behavior of the job."¹ The EEOC's published questions and answers on the Guidelines go further. There must be "a defined, well recognized body of information," and knowing it must be a prerequisite to the required work.² The work behavior each item relates to "should be identified on an item by item basis."²

Three practical requirements follow from those passages. The first is that the terms come from the documents the new hire will handle. The second is that the test "should fairly sample the information that is actually used by the employee on the job," with items no harder or easier than the knowledge as it is used.² The third is an exclusion. The Guidelines advise against decisions based on knowledge "normally learned in a brief orientation period" where the measure has an adverse impact.¹ A term every new hire learns in the first week of work does not belong on the test.

Some fields have a codified vocabulary

Some fields publish their terminology formally. The AMA Manual of Style, the reference used across medical publishing, has a nomenclature chapter explaining "which names should be used and how they should be styled" in areas including cardiology, drugs, genetics, and psychiatry.³ The same chapter notes that "official systems of nomenclature are not universally observed to the letter."³ At the level of principle, the international standard ISO 704 describes terminology work as setting out "the links between objects, concepts, definitions and designations," and applies it to scientific, technological, legal, and administrative fields.⁴

Where a field has a codified nomenclature, the "well recognized body of information" the EEOC describes is easy to locate. Where it does not, the employer's own style guide and its archive of past documents are the nearest equivalent. In both cases the source of the test terms can be named in writing, which is what the item-by-item linkage requires.

What an editor needs to know about terms

The editorial standards describe a narrower task than mastery of the field. Editors Canada acknowledges that editors work on subjects and materials "that require specialized knowledge and skills."⁵ Its specific standards concern consistency and the reader. An editor should "use only the same words for the same meaning, and different words for different meanings," should resolve variations in terminology, and should use the intended readers' vocabulary as much as possible.⁵ The same standards ask editors to "defer to subject matter experts on content."⁵

Federal plain-language guidance takes a compatible position. It states that avoiding jargon does not mean "leaving out necessary technical terms," and it describes special terms as "useful shorthand within a particular audience."⁶ The CDC's Clear Communication Index asks whether material uses "words the primary audience uses," and it expects an unfamiliar term to be explained where it appears.⁷ Read together, these sources describe a test that asks a candidate to recognize a term, to choose the correct term in context, and to apply one term consistently. A test built on expert definitions of every concept in a field would measure the subject expert's job rather than the editor's.

The vocabulary test in a hiring process

EditingTests.com's Industry Vocabulary Test is multiple choice and is scored against a stored answer key, as the validity and research page explains. Its question banks are built with AI-assisted generation, and newly generated questions stay inactive until an editor enables them. A candidate's answers and results are released to the employer who sent the invitation, and EditingTests.com does not sell personal data. The site does not advise on whether a particular test meets the Guidelines for a particular job; that question belongs to the employer and its counsel.

The EEOC lists tests of "knowledge of a particular function or job" among the cognitive tests employers use, and it expects test specifications to be updated as job requirements change.⁸ A vocabulary test cannot show whether a candidate can edit a paragraph, and an editing test set in unfamiliar material cannot show whether the candidate knows the field. For a specialized editing role, the two tests answer different questions, and a hiring process can use both.

Notes

1. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and others, Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, 29 CFR Part 1607, sections 1607.5(F), 1607.14(C) and 1607.16, CFR 2024 edition. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-29/subtitle-B/chapter-XIV/part-1607 ↩
2. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and others, "Questions and Answers to Clarify and Provide a Common Interpretation of the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures," 44 Fed. Reg. 11996, March 2, 1979, question 79. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/questions-and-answers-clarify-and-provide-common-interpretation-uniform-guidelines ↩
3. JAMA Network Editors, AMA Manual of Style, 11th edition, "Nomenclature," published online February 3, 2020. https://academic.oup.com/amamanualofstyle/book/27941/chapter/207568211 ↩
4. International Organization for Standardization, ISO 704:2022, Terminology work: Principles and methods, July 2022. https://www.iso.org/standard/79077.html ↩
5. Editors Canada, Professional Editorial Standards 2024, introduction and standards A5.6, C6.1 and D2.3. https://editors.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/EditorsCanada_ProfessionalEditorialStandards_2024.pdf ↩
6. U.S. General Services Administration, "Avoid jargon," Plain Language Guide Series, September 15, 2025. https://digital.gov/guides/plain-language/principles/avoid-jargon ↩
7. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Clear Communication Index User Guide, August 2019, item 7. https://www.cdc.gov/ccindex/pdf/clear-communication-user-guide.pdf ↩
8. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, "Employment Tests and Selection Procedures," December 1, 2007. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/employment-tests-and-selection-procedures ↩