Glossary
Job requisition
A job requisition is a formal request to fill a job, usually listing the job title, team, budget and reason for hiring, which must be approved before hiring starts.
A requisition, often shortened to “req,” is how a company says yes to a new hire. Before anyone writes a job post or interviews an applicant, someone who controls the budget approves the request. Everything that follows refers back to it.
What a requisition usually contains
- Job title and level, for example junior or senior.
- Team and hiring manager, the manager the new person will report to.
- Reason for the hire. A new job, replacing someone who left, or growth.
- Budget. Pay range and any other costs.
- Location and working pattern. In the office, a mix of office and home, or fully remote.
- Target start date.
- Number of openings. One requisition can cover several identical jobs.
- Who approves it. Usually the manager’s manager, finance and HR.
Requisition, job description, job post
These three get confused:
| What it is | Who sees it | |
|---|---|---|
| Requisition | Internal approval to hire | The company |
| Job description | What the job involves and requires | The company, sometimes applicants |
| Job post | The public ad for the job | Applicants |
The requisition approves the cost. The job description defines the work. The job post persuades people to apply.
An example
A support team lead asks for two new agents because the number of customer requests has grown. The requisition lists the job title, the pay range, a target start in six weeks, and a note about the growth. Finance approves. The requisition gets an ID number, and every applicant, interview and offer for those two jobs is recorded against it in the company’s applicant tracking system, its hiring software.
Why it matters for interviews
The requisition is where the job is first written down, so it’s the natural place to list the three to five skills the new person needs. If those skills are clear from the start, the job post, the interview questions and the scorecard can all be based on the same list.
Common mistakes
- Requisitions that stay open forever. They make time-to-fill numbers (how long it takes to fill a job) misleading, and people keep applying for jobs that aren’t really open.
- Approving a budget before anyone describes the job. Hiring starts before anyone agrees on what the person will do.
- Changing the job after approval without updating the requisition, so the records no longer match what’s really happening.
- Slow approvals. The time it takes to fill the job really starts when the need appears, not when the paperwork catches up.