TL;DR

A job requisition is the internal document that authorises a company to hire for a specific role. It's the formal request that converts a hiring manager's need into an approved headcount. Nothing in the hiring process should start before it exists. In practice, recruitment often begins before it's approved, which is how you end up conducting a three-month search and discovering at offer stage that finance never signed off.

What a Job Requisition Is

The job requisition is the paper trail that connects a business need to a budget approval to a hire. A hiring manager identifies a need and submits a requisition. Finance, HR, and often a senior business leader review it. If approved, the headcount is confirmed, the budget is reserved, and recruitment begins.

A complete requisition typically includes: the department and reporting structure, the role title and level, whether it is a new headcount or a backfill, the proposed start date, the salary range and total compensation budget, the employment type (permanent, fixed-term, part-time), the justification for the hire, and whether the role is replacing someone or is net new.

The distinction between backfill and new headcount matters for the approval process. Backfills are generally easier to approve because the budget already existed. Net new headcount requires a business case: why does this role need to exist, what will it produce, and why can't the work be absorbed by the current team. Finance and operations teams scrutinise new headcount more carefully, especially in environments where headcount is tracked against plan.

Why It Matters for Recruitment

Recruiters who start work on unconfirmed requisitions are taking on process risk. A candidate who reaches final-stage interviews for a role that never gets formally approved is a candidate you've just alienated. A recruiter who has spent four weeks sourcing against a req that gets cancelled when economic conditions shift has wasted four weeks.

The requisition also creates the framework for consistent evaluation. A well-written requisition captures the agreed job level, compensation band, and key requirements, which means the recruiter and hiring manager start from the same document. When disagreements emerge about whether a candidate is right for the role, the requisition provides the reference point.

From a compliance and audit perspective, the requisition record is important. Equal employment opportunity audits, internal compensation equity reviews, and external regulatory inquiries all benefit from documented evidence that hiring decisions started with an approved, consistent description of what was needed.

For companies using applicant tracking systems, the requisition is the object that organises everything else: job postings link to a req, candidates are tracked against it, and headcount reporting is pulled from it. A missing or poorly written req creates data quality problems throughout the system.

In Practice

A company grew from 200 to 450 employees over 18 months and ran its hiring informally for much of that period. Requisitions were often verbal or existed as Slack messages. When they undertook a compensation equity review ahead of a funding round, they found that 30% of roles hired during that period had inconsistent levels and titles because no approved req existed to anchor the decision. Several employees were in roles that didn't formally exist in the compensation structure. Correcting this required retroactive reclassification work that took three months and surfaced several compensation equity gaps requiring adjustment.

Key Facts