What it is
A job requisition is the internal request to open a role: a hiring manager identifies a need, and it is routed for sign-off, usually through HR and, if it needs new or backfilled budget, finance, before the vacancy is authorised to move. It sits inside the company's own ATS or HRIS, Workday, Greenhouse, SAP SuccessFactors and similar systems, often carrying a requisition ID from the moment it is raised. Nothing external happens yet. No agency has been briefed, no advert is live, and the role does not officially exist outside the client's own systems.
This is the step before the job order. A job order is what a client hands outward once it decides to work the vacancy through an agency or consultant; the requisition is the client's own internal permission slip, and it can precede that decision by days or weeks, if an agency is ever briefed at all. Some requisitions clear approval and go straight to an internal talent team or a direct-hire process, and an outside recruiter never sees them. Others leak early: a requisition still working through sign-off, or one that has just cleared it, sometimes appears as a live posting on a careers page or job board before any agency has been contacted, which makes it one of the earliest visible traces that a role will exist at all.
A job requisition is the earliest trace of a role that will exist. Most agencies never see it until it is already a race.
Why it matters
For a desk that wants to be first, the requisition matters more than the job order, because it is earlier. A job order tells you a vacancy is already being worked, possibly by three other agencies at once. A requisition, or the signals that precede one, funding, a headcount plan, a new leader hired into a function, tells you a role is forming before the client has decided who gets to work it. Reach the hiring manager or HR while that decision is still open and you are positioned for exclusivity or a retained mandate rather than a place in a queue.
The approval stage is also where roles genuinely stall. A requisition can sit for days or weeks waiting on a budget sign-off, and organisations that pre-approve headcount rather than seeking case-by-case sign-off report meaningfully faster time-to-fill as a result, because sourcing can start the day the need is identified rather than the day finance finally clears it. A consultant who understands that lag can time outreach to land as a requisition clears, not weeks later once it is already a public posting and a race.
How boilr handles it
boilr's signal-led BD is built to catch what happens before a requisition is even raised: funding events, leadership hires, headcount growth and other signals on ICP-matched accounts that typically precede a hiring decision. Where a requisition does surface early, a newly live careers-page listing, a fresh entry in a client's own ATS, a job-board posting with no history behind it, boilr treats it as an early buying signal rather than something to chase blind, and corroborates it against everything else it knows about the account.
Every requisition-stage signal is logged against the account in the Company Brain, tracked through to see whether it turns into a real job order and, eventually, a placement. That history means the desk can tell which accounts' early signals reliably convert and which tend to stall in approval, so outreach lands on the accounts most likely to produce a winnable mandate rather than a chase that goes nowhere. You verify and send from Tasks; boilr does the watching.
