We Just Want to Hire the Best Person For the Job

Job descriptions are full of requirements nobody actually checks once a candidate walks in the door. A close look at how sourcing and recruiting teams can rewrite the rules they've been handed, without waiting for a seat at the leadership table, starts with the intake meeting: a short call, ideally under thirty-five minutes, with every interviewer in the room before a single candidate is sourced. That meeting is where the real requirements surface, often nothing like what's printed on the job posting.

Two long-standing assumptions get challenged directly:

• The college degree requirement, which makes sense for licensed or technical roles like nursing, accounting or data science, but rarely matters for most other positions. Hiring managers almost never ask whether a candidate has the degree once they're excited about the person's skills and fit.
• The years-of-experience requirement, which frequently gets invented arbitrarily and ignores that some candidates achieve in months what others take years to do. A candidate with less tenure but sharper, more efficient skill application often outperforms someone who simply logged more time.

Federal contracting is called out as the clear exception: when a contract specifies a degree or a minimum number of years, those terms have to be honored exactly, because non-compliance can cost the company financially. Outside of that context, though, rigid checklists mostly just narrow the pool and exclude people from historically marginalized communities who may not have had the chance to finish college or accumulate a long resume in a narrow specialty.

Beyond formal qualifications, practical ways to evaluate candidates get outlined: distinguishing people who manage projects from people who manage teams, spotting self-starters who need minimal supervision, and looking for evidence that someone collaborates well with others through community involvement, team activities or volunteer leadership.

A large part of doing this work well comes down to confronting personal bias rather than waiting for organizational policy to change. Recognizing assumptions tied to race, religion, age, gender or physical ability, and choosing to override them case by case, is presented as something every sourcer and recruiter can control regardless of their title or authority.

The overall approach: build a "wiggle room" list in advance, know which requirements are truly non-negotiable, and push back on the rest so that a wider, more representative set of qualified people actually gets a fair look.