Job requisition

A requisition, or “req,” is how a company says yes to a hire. Before anyone writes a job post or screens a candidate, someone with budget authority approves the request. The req then becomes the reference point for everything that follows.

What a requisition usually contains

• Job title and level.
• Team and hiring manager.
• Reason for the hire. A new role, a backfill, or growth.
• Budget. Salary range and any other costs.
• Location and working pattern. On-site, hybrid or remote.
• Target start date.
• Number of openings. One req can cover several identical roles.
• Approvers. Usually the manager’s manager, finance and HR.

Requisition, job description, job post

These three get confused:

The req approves the spend. The job description defines the work. The job post persuades people to apply.

An example

A support lead requests two new agents because ticket volume has grown. The req lists the title, the salary range, a target start in six weeks, and a note on the growth in volume. Finance approves. The req gets an ID, and every candidate, interview and offer for those two roles is tracked against it in the ATS.

Why it matters for screening

The req is where the role is first written down, so it’s the natural place to capture the three to five skills the hire needs. If those skills are clear at the req stage, the job post, the screening questions and the scorecard all follow from the same source.

Common mistakes

• Evergreen reqs that never close. They distort time-to-fill metrics and keep candidates applying for roles that aren’t really open.
• Approving budget without a role definition. Recruiting starts before anyone agrees on what the person will do.
• Changing the role after approval without updating the req, so the numbers and the reality drift apart.
• Slow approvals. Time to fill starts ticking from the moment the need is real, not when paperwork catches up.