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A requisition is a request to spend company money creating capacity. Almost nobody reviews it that way.
Somewhere in your company right now, a requisition is moving through approval. It has a title, a level, a salary band, a hiring manager, and a start date somebody would prefer. By the time it reaches talent acquisition, it will have been approved by at least two people, and possibly five.
Ask what any of them actually reviewed and the answer is usually the same: they reviewed whether the money was in the budget.
That is not a review of the decision. That is a review of the paperwork attached to a decision somebody already made, probably months earlier, possibly in a planning spreadsheet where the role existed as a number in a cell. The approvals confirmed that the number was still there.
Meanwhile the thing being decided is genuinely large. A single professional hire commits the company to something on the order of a million dollars over a few years once you count salary, benefits, equity, management overhead, tooling, and the opportunity cost of the alternative uses of that money. Capital expenditures of that size get business cases, scenario analysis, and someone from finance asking uncomfortable questions. Headcount gets a form.
The Usual Way
The standard sequence runs like this. Budget approved in planning. Old job description retrieved and lightly updated, usually by copying the previous version and changing whatever is obviously wrong. Salary band confirmed against whatever data the company has. Kickoff scheduled with the recruiter.
Every step assumes the decision. None of them tests it. The review is procedural, which is why it never surfaces the problems that will define the next six months: that the role as written is two jobs, that the level is wrong, that the band is below what the market pays, that the profile does not exist in meaningful numbers within an hour of the office, or that the last three people in this seat left within a year for a reason nobody has examined.
Those problems do not disappear because the review skipped them. They resurface in month four, at which point they belong to TA.
Worth being precise about where this sits, because it is easy to confuse with the meeting that follows it. The intake meeting is where you work out how to make a role choosable. The requisition review is where you work out whether this is the right role to be buying at all, and in what shape. Run them as one conversation and the second question quietly disappears, because by then everyone is already solving for how.
The growth question
Here is the reframe the entire review turns on.
A requisition is not a staffing request. It is a request to invest company resources in creating a specific capacity the business does not currently have.
Which means the question is not "can we fill this?" That is the fulfillment question, and asking it first concedes everything. The question is: is this the capacity the business should be buying, in this shape, at this price, on this timeline? Everything below is a way of answering that.
Examine the outcome first
Before anything about the person, establish what the role is for.
Why does this capacity need to exist? What becomes possible once it does? What specifically breaks, slows, or gets riskier if it does not? What is the consequence of this seat being empty in six months, expressed in something other than "the team is stretched"?
Most requisitions answer these easily, because most requisitions are legitimate. But a meaningful minority cannot, and those are the ones worth catching. A role that exists because a headcount was approved last year and nobody wants to lose it. A backfill triggered automatically by a departure, without anyone asking whether the work still needs doing in that configuration. A role created to relieve pressure on a manager whose actual problem is prioritization, not capacity.
Filling those roles quickly is not a win. It is an expensive way of avoiding a conversation.
Examine the role itself
Assuming the outcome holds up, turn to the design.
Is this one role or two? The single most common requisition failure is the composite: a role assembled by listing everything a team needs, which produces a person who does not exist. If the requirements span two distinct labor markets, you have written a fantasy, and the market will take five months to tell you so.
Is the level right? Companies routinely under-level roles to fit a band and then wonder why senior candidates decline, or over-level them to attract interest and then cannot afford the person who applies.
Which requirements are actually necessary, and which are copied forward? This is where the most value hides, and there is now real evidence about how much of it is there.
IBM began stripping degree requirements from its postings years ago. The share of its job openings requiring a four-year degree fell from around 95% in 2011 to under half by early 2021, and something like 15 to 20% of its annual hires now come in without one. Maryland did the same thing at the state level in March 2022, becoming the first state to systematically remove four-year degree requirements, opening roughly half of its 38,000 jobs to candidates skilled through alternative routes: military service, apprenticeships, on-the-job training, community college. Within six months the state reported a 34% increase in applicants from that group.
Neither organization discovered that degrees were useless. They discovered that a requirement which had been treated as load-bearing was, for a large share of roles, simply inherited. Nobody had audited it because nobody had been asked to.
Now the counterweight, which matters more than the headline. In February 2024, the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School examined what actually happened at companies that removed degree requirements from postings. The finding was sobering: fewer than 1 in 700 hires were attributable to the change, a net shift of roughly 0.14 percentage points. Around 45% of firms had made the change in name only, with no detectable difference in who they actually hired. Nearly all the real movement came from about a third of the companies studied.
Read those two findings together and you have the entire argument for taking requisition review seriously. Requirements are frequently not real. And deleting a requirement from a document changes nothing at all unless the people making the decision change how they decide. A review that edits the posting and leaves the screening behavior intact has accomplished paperwork.
So the useful question is not "can we drop this requirement?" It is "if a candidate arrived without it, would this hiring manager actually advance them?" If the honest answer is no, the requirement is real regardless of what the posting says, and you should plan for the market that requirement creates.
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Run the market test
Now leave the building. This is the part TA is uniquely equipped to do and most often skips.
Does this person exist in meaningful numbers, within the geography and working model on offer? Not "are there people with this title," but how many, where, and how many are plausibly open to moving.
Who else is competing for them right now? Which companies, offering what, at what level? A role that looks reasonable in isolation can be unwinnable once you see it next to what three better-known competitors are offering the same profile this quarter.
Are the constraints realistic against that picture? The band, the location policy, the seniority, the start date. Any one of them can be the thing that makes the role unfillable, and all of them are adjustable now and nearly impossible to adjust in month four without an embarrassing conversation.
Bring evidence rather than impressions. "This will be hard" is an opinion. "Here are the twelve companies hiring this profile in this metro, here is what they are paying, and here is where our band sits against them" is a finding, and findings change decisions.
Run the choice test
The market test asks whether the person exists. The choice test asks why they would pick you.
What does this role offer that the alternatives do not? Not the company, the role. The specific work, ownership, learning, and trajectory that a particular person would weigh against the other offers on their list. If the answer is a set of adjectives that would apply equally to any of the twelve competitors you just identified, the role does not have a proposition yet. It has a description.
And what tradeoff are we asking someone to accept? Every role has one. Less structure, more ambiguity. Smaller brand, bigger scope. Legacy systems, real ownership. Naming it in the review does two things: it tells you which candidates to target, and it stops you from being surprised when the wrong ones decline.
There are three possible outcomes, not one
Most requisition reviews have exactly one available outcome, which is why they are not really reviews.
A real one has three.
Go. The outcome is clear, the role is coherent, the market supports it, and the proposition holds. Proceed, and proceed faster than you otherwise would have, because the ambiguity got resolved up front.
Redesign. The most common useful outcome. Split the composite role. Adjust the level to match the band, or the band to match the level. Convert two of the five requirements to teachable. Reconsider the location constraint. Reshape the role around the person who actually exists rather than the one who was imagined. This is not obstruction. It is the difference between a role that fills in eight weeks and one that fills in six months or never.
Do not hire. Sometimes the honest answer. The work does not need doing in this shape. The capacity would be better bought another way, or the underlying problem is not a headcount problem at all. This outcome is rare, uncomfortable, and occasionally the most valuable thing TA does all quarter.
Never bring a veto. Bring a choice.
The “do not hire” outcome is the one most likely to make TA uncomfortable, because a function measured on roles filled has been trained to experience any version of no as failure.
But the goal is not to become the department that rejects requisitions. It is to stop pretending impossible tradeoffs do not exist.
A badly designed requisition can consume months of recruiter capacity, advertising spend, hiring-manager time, interviewer hours, and candidate goodwill before everyone finally admits the original assumptions were wrong. A role that refuses to get filled is almost never a sourcing problem, and the cheapest moment to fix it is before it opens.
So never bring a veto when you can bring a choice. “We can hire this as written in roughly seven months, or split it into two roles and start next month, or raise the band 12% and target three months. Which tradeoff does the business want?”
That is not obstruction. It is decision support. The business still owns the choice. TA makes sure the choice is real.
What good looks like
The old requisition review ends when the form is approved.
The better one ends with a role that can actually win in the market it is about to enter, or a documented decision to change it, or a documented decision not to hire. It ends with the hiring manager understanding what the market will and will not give them at this price. It ends with the tradeoff named out loud, so nobody is surprised by it in week nine. And it ends with TA holding evidence rather than instructions.
You will know it is working when hiring managers start bringing you roles before they are approved, because the conversation is more useful than the form.
