Are My Job Requirements Too Specific? How to Tell Before the Search Stalls

Last updated: September 18, 2026

By Samantha Litman, Executive Search, Marketing, Creative & Media, KORE1

Your job requirements are too specific when they describe one person’s resume instead of the work the role exists to do. The usual tells are exact year counts, a single-industry rule, a long software list, and good candidates turned down over lines nobody can connect to the job.

Probably.

It’s what I tell most clients, usually before I’ve even read the posting. I get why it happens. A long, exact list feels safe. It feels like rigor. Ask for everything and surely you’ll end up with someone good, right?

Not quite. What tends to happen is the search goes quiet, fewer people apply, the ones who do are each missing something, and even the good conversations end with “we love her, but she doesn’t have X.” By the time anyone asks whether X ever mattered, a month is gone.

I’ve spent more than 25 years recruiting marketing, creative, media, and entertainment talent, and today I do it with KORE1’s marketing recruiting team. Clients ask me this constantly. “Are my requirements too specific?” Or its close cousin, “Is specific industry experience limiting us too much?” This is my long answer to both. The bigger-picture version, about treating the job description as a blueprint instead of the finished house, is its own post, so think of this one as the practical follow-up on how to tell which lines are too tight and how to catch them before a search stalls.

What Counts as a Job Requirement?

Job requirements are what a candidate has to bring before you’ll consider them for a role, whether that’s a skill, a kind of experience, a degree or credential, or a condition like location or schedule. Preferred qualifications are extras you’d like but would hire without. Every requirement screens people out, so each one should trace back to real work.

That last part is where most lists drift. A requirement is supposed to describe the job. Somewhere along the way it starts describing a person.

Quick legal detour, and since I’m a recruiter it’ll be a short one. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has a phrase I find really useful. I ran into it in a plain-English guide the agency wrote for employers on the Americans with Disabilities Act. The real requirements are “essential functions,” which the EEOC describes as “the basic job duties that an employee must be able to perform.” One factor it lists for deciding whether a function is essential is simply whether the reason the position exists is to perform that function. It also says a written job description prepared before you advertise will be considered evidence of what’s essential.

Evidence. Not the final word, but evidence. The description you write before posting counts as a record of what the job requires, stray lines included, and that alone is a pretty good reason to be choosy about what goes on it.

Six Signs the List Is Too Tight

None of these is fatal on its own, but when two or three of them turn up on the same posting, I’d bet good money the search is already slowing down, whether or not anybody on the team has said so out loud yet.

• A company name has snuck in. “Experience at a major holding-company agency” is a resume you’ve already pictured. So is “must come from a top streaming service.”
• Why seven-plus years? Ask the room. More often than not, the answer is that the person who left had seven, or that seven just sounded senior enough.
• I’ve seen motion designer postings require After Effects, Cinema 4D, Blender, Unreal Engine, Houdini, and Premiere Pro, for a role that mostly lives in After Effects. When the software list runs longer than the list of things the person will actually do, something’s off.
• Beauty only. Gaming only. Packaged goods only. More on this below, because it’s the one I push back on hardest.
• Two jobs are wearing one title, like an art director who’s also expected to write the copy, run paid social, and cut the video.
• Listen to your debriefs. If interviewers keep liking people and the “no” keeps landing on a line from the list, rather than on anything the candidate said or showed in the room, the list is doing your interviewing for you.

Every Line Multiplies

Here’s the part people underestimate. Requirements don’t add up. They multiply.

Some quick, completely made-up math, just to show the shape of it. Say a third of the strong social media leads in your market have beauty experience. Half of those have run a brand account with a big, noisy community behind it, and a third of that group knows the listening tool your team happens to use, Sprinklr, say. Then the market takes its own cut, because maybe half the people left would consider a move right now. Three reasonable-sounding lines plus one bit of reality, and you’re down to roughly one strong candidate in 36. Add a city. Keep dividing.

Nobody writes a list this way. Each line gets judged by itself, and by itself each one sounds fair.

The good news is that the math runs backward too, and there’s real data on it. LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team found in its 2023 Skills-First report that talent pools grow nearly tenfold on average when employers take a skills-first approach instead of filtering on job titles and degrees. Its consumer services breakdown hits even closer to home for me. The pool for content managers grew 19 times over. Communications managers, 16. Marketing assistants, 11. I wasn’t surprised. Those are exactly the roles where I watch talented people get filtered out for holding the “wrong” title at a company nobody on the hiring team has heard of.

Is Industry Experience Limiting Your Search?

This is the question I hear right behind “are we too specific,” and my answer is usually yes, a little. Not always for the reason people expect, though.

Category experience feels like the safest line on the list. Of course the beverage brand wants someone from beverage. Of course the streaming service wants streaming. But ask yourself what, specifically, the new hire would get wrong in their first month without it. Sometimes there’s a real answer. Retail media has its own buying models. Entertainment marketing lives and dies by release dates. Regulated categories put legal review on every piece of creative. Other times the honest answer is nothing much. They’d need a few weeks to catch up, maybe a month if the category is a strange one, and I’d put that on the learnable pile every time.

The lines between industries are moving, too. One of the biggest trends I’m seeing right now is in experiential and brand partnership roles, where entertainment and creative companies are stretching what they already do into adjacent areas without building whole new departments. Entertainment companies are going after business that advertising agencies have held for years. There used to be a real divide there. Now the lines have blurred.

So when a posting says “must have agency experience,” I want to know which kind. Someone who came up in partnerships at a studio may have done more agency-style deal work than a person with “agency” on every line of their resume.

Industry knowledge is usually learnable. Judgment, taste, and how someone handles a difficult client usually aren’t, at least not quickly. If you have to choose, choose the second group. Some of the best people I’ve ever placed looked like a stretch on paper, and they walked in with ideas nobody on the team had had yet.

Day One, Learnable, or Nice to Have

When a client brings me a list that isn’t working, rewriting comes last. First I take each line on its own and ask three questions.

What goes wrong in the first 90 days if the new hire doesn’t have this? Be concrete. “They’d struggle” isn’t an answer. “They’d miss the upfronts because they’ve never planned against them” is. Could a strong person learn it in their first three months, with decent onboarding and a patient manager? And the one that stings a little. Would you turn down your favorite candidate for missing it?

Then every line lands in one of three buckets. Needed on day one. Learnable. Nice to have. The first bucket stays in the requirements section, the second moves to “preferred” or disappears, and the third comes off the posting entirely and lives in your interview notes, where it can break a tie without scaring anybody away.

Here’s how that plays out on a composite senior media planner posting. I pieced it together from ones I see all the time. No single client wrote it.

Your answers won’t match mine, and they shouldn’t. What matters is that somebody asked the question out loud, line by line, before the posting went live.

Twenty Seats at Once

Before KORE1, a media agency brought me in right after it won a major entertainment account. It needed more than 20 people, fast, across analytics, strategy, media, ad operations, and senior leadership, and what started as a hiring surge turned into a relationship of about five years.

You can’t afford a wish list on 20 seats at once. You have to get to what each seat really needs on day one. The new client isn’t going to wait while you hold out for perfect.

What made it work? Honestly, access. I worked directly with the hiring managers, almost as an extension of their internal team, so when a requirement wasn’t holding up in the market, we could talk about it right away instead of letting a search drift for weeks. A senior analytics leader needs a very different must-have list than an ad operations supervisor. Neither should be copied off the last posting somebody had lying around.

One detail from that surge stays with me. Many of the people I placed then were later promoted. Not one or two. Many. The list described the job they were starting. Nobody could have written down the job they’d grow into. I’d argue nobody should try.

Your Screen Still Reads the Old List

Say you do all of this. You trim the list, move half of it to “preferred,” and repost. Done?

Not yet. The posting is only the part candidates see, and behind it sits a screen, whether that’s a coordinator reading resumes, a set of knockout questions in your applicant tracking system, or an AI tool ranking applicants, so if that screen is still hunting for the old list, nothing has really changed.

There’s research on exactly this. A 2024 study from the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work project looked at 11,300 roles at large employers that had dropped a degree requirement from their postings. About 45% of the firms, in the report’s words, seemed “to make a change in name only,” with no meaningful difference in who they actually hired. The words came off the posting. The filter stayed put.

AI screening makes this matter more, not less. AI is genuinely helpful for finding people, especially earlier in their careers, and it’ll hand you a long list of candidates who are qualified on paper. What it can’t know is your company, your culture, or who’s going to fit. It reads every line literally. Every single one. You still need a real interview process to find out whether someone is right for the role.

So whoever, or whatever, does your first pass needs the same short list you just agreed on. The day-one requirements. Not the old wish list. If you work with an outside recruiter, ask how they screen before a resume ever reaches you, and if you want something to compare their answer against, KORE1 has written up how it screens and vets every candidate, layer by layer.

I care about this for a reason that shows up a year later. KORE1 measures its placements by whether people stay, and the firm’s 12-month retention rate is 92%. I measure my own work the same way. A good placement is a match that still feels like the right decision months and years later, for the client and the candidate both, and you don’t get there by hiring whoever matched the most keywords.

Sometimes Specific Is the Job

Now the other side of it. Some requirements should be very specific, and loosening them would do you a disservice.

Remember that EEOC factor, whether the position exists to perform the function? If yes, get as specific as you want. If the job is brand partnerships and the whole reason the role exists is to bring relationships with talent reps and sponsors, those relationships are the job. Ask for them. An ad operations supervisor who has to run trafficking on your ad server from day one, with campaigns already live, shouldn’t be learning the platform on your clients’ time. Same for an executive producer who has to own a production budget the size of yours on the very first shoot. None of that is too specific. It’s the job, written down plainly.

Then there’s the gray zone. Sometimes a team honestly can’t agree whether a requirement matters. The brand director wants category experience, and the CMO couldn’t care less. I’d rather you test it with real work than argue about it in a conference room. More clients have been asking me about contract-to-full-time lately anyway, partly because budgets are tighter and nobody wants to carry a full-time salary on a hunch. A contract-to-hire arrangement lets you find out whether the missing line ever matters once the work starts. Often it doesn’t.

Must-Haves, Nice-to-Haves, and Everything Between

How Many Must-Haves Is Too Many?

Fewer than most postings carry. If your must-have list is longer than the list of things the person will actually do each week, it has stopped describing the job. I’d rather see a short list you’d defend line by line than a long one nobody believes.

Should a Posting Still List Preferred Qualifications?

Yes, if they’re labeled clearly and kept to a handful. Candidates tend to read every line as a rule, so a short, honest “nice to have” section shows people where the flexibility is. A long one just looks like a second requirements list.

Will Loosening Requirements Flood Us With Unqualified Applicants?

A few more, sure. That’s a screening problem, and a much better one to have than an empty pipeline. The fix is a sharp first-pass screen built on your day-one must-haves, not a posting that scares good people off before you ever meet them.

Can an AI Screening Tool Tell a Must-Have From a Nice-to-Have?

Only if you tell it which is which. Most tools rank against whatever you feed them, so a wish list goes in and a wish list’s worth of rejections comes out. They’re great at finding people who look qualified on paper. Deciding who’ll actually fit is still a human job.

What If My Team Can’t Agree on What’s Required?

Then you’ve found the real problem, and finding it before the search opens beats finding it in the final round. Get the hiring manager and the key interviewers together first, sort the list into day-one, learnable, and nice-to-have as a group, and write down why each line landed where it did. It’s a short meeting that can save you weeks.

Who Did You Almost Hire?

Try this before you post anything else. Think about the best candidate you turned down this year. Which line on the list did they miss? And looking back, did it matter?

If the honest answer is “not really,” that line is your first edit. If you want to talk through a list before it goes live, or a search that’s already gone quiet, bring it to me. KORE1’s creative staffing team works on exactly this kind of search, and I’m always happy to take a look. Let’s talk. Or find me on LinkedIn, where I’m easy to reach.