hiring

Pluralhirings (some meanings)

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act of taking someone on as a paid employee.

   The store's hiring picked up sharply before the holiday season.

   Careful hiring helps a business avoid costly staffing mistakes.

   Similarrecruitment, recruiting, employment

   Oppositefiring, dismissal

   Note

   Each appointment can be counted, and the plural lives mostly in the pairing hirings and firings. Matthew d'Ancona, writing in The New York Times in 2016, used it of the brutality of Theresa May's hirings and firings. Used without a plural, the noun names the activity in general (hiring slowed this quarter).

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of hire.

   The restaurant is hiring servers ahead of the busy season.

   Several companies are hiring remotely now.

   Note

   The -ing form does double duty. As a participle it builds the progressive (the restaurant is hiring), and as a gerund it can still take an object (hiring servers takes time). That object is the test against the noun for the act, which takes a plural, hirings, but no object. In British use the verb also stretches to premises and paid services, not only to people.

3. 3
   nounhistoricalcountable

   A fair or market, now historical, where servants and laborers were engaged for work.

   At the Martinmas hiring, farm servants negotiated their wages for the coming year.

   The annual hiring drew laborers from across the county to the market town.

   Similarfair

   Note

   A word for the occasion rather than the act: laborers went to the hiring, and each year's fair was a hiring in its own right. It belongs to writing about the past. In a modern sentence, the hiring will be read as the act of taking on staff unless the setting makes the old fair clear, such as a market town or a named season.

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