Setup Considerations: what you ask candidates for

What this achieves

What you ask a candidate for decides how many people apply and how much you know about each one. These decisions are worth making before a posting goes live, because changing them after applications arrive leaves you comparing candidates you asked different things of.

Decision 1: what the application collects

The application form is the same for every posting. It asks for a first name, a last name, and an email address, and offers a phone number, a LinkedIn address, and a cover letter as optional.

That is the whole form. There is no screening questionnaire to add, and no file upload, so a CV is not collected as part of applying.

Two consequences follow:

What you know at the point of application is thin by design. Depth comes from the assessment, from what you record on the candidate afterwards, and from the conversation.
If your process depends on reading a CV, plan for how it will reach you and where it will be filed, because the application will not carry one.

Example: HC Corp treats the cover letter as the only free-text signal it gets at application, so its postings ask a specific question in the job description rather than expecting a general covering note.

Decision 2: whether to require an assessment

Requiring an assessment means an applicant completes it before their application is reviewed. It is the single largest decision on this list, because it changes both who applies and how you compare people.

Option	Description
No assessment	Fastest for the candidate. You compare people on application detail and interviews.
Assessment required	Every applicant is measured against the same job profile requirements, producing a comparable result and a gap breakdown for each.

The requirement lives on the job profile, not on the requisition: a requisition can only ask for an assessment if the job profile it uses has one configured. Deciding this therefore means deciding which roles have job profiles with assessments at all.

Example: HC Corp requires an assessment for engineering roles, where a skills comparison is the point, and not for a warehouse operative role, where it would deter applicants without telling the company much.

An assessment result is evidence for a person to weigh, not a filter that decides. Treat the score and the gaps as input to a human decision, and keep the decision with the human.

Decision 3: what the posting shows

Option	Description
Show salary on posting	Displays the range to applicants. Fewer applications, better matched, and no conversation about money at the end that could have happened at the start.
Keep the range internal	More applications, and the risk of reaching offer stage with someone whose expectations you never tested.
Internal only	Only employees see the posting. Use it when you want to test internal interest before advertising outside.

Example: HC Corp shows the range on its engineering postings and keeps a Finance Director search internal-only for two weeks before opening it.

Decision 4: a closing date, or none

A closing date stops the posting accepting applications. Leaving it empty means the posting runs until you close the requisition yourself.

An open-ended posting is fine for a role you are always hiring for and poor for one with a deadline, because it produces a queue nobody feels obliged to work through.

Decision 5: how long you keep candidate records

Candidates are people who do not work for you and, in most cases, never will. Their records stay in your system until you do something about them.

Candidate records carry a status, including archived and blacklisted, and those states are how a record is kept out of active use without being removed. Decide who is allowed to set them and what each means at your company, because “archived” applied inconsistently is not a retention policy.

How long you keep candidate data is a decision with data-protection consequences for you as the employer, and it is yours to make. Agree a retention period with whoever is accountable for data protection in your organization, and apply it deliberately rather than letting records accumulate by default.

What is expensive to change later

Decision	Cost of changing later
Requiring an assessment mid-hire	High. Candidates already in the pipeline were not asked for one, so you are comparing two kinds of evidence for the same role.
Salary visibility after applications arrive	Medium. Early applicants applied without knowing the range, and later ones did.
Internal-only after external applications exist	Medium. You cannot un-see the external candidates, and it is awkward to explain.
Closing date	Low. It moves a date.
Retention practice	Low to change, high to have got wrong. The records you already hold are the ones that matter.

What happens next

Once these are settled, create the requisition with the posting settings you decided on and publish it. The assessment requirement in particular is worth confirming on the job profile before you publish, because it cannot be added to a requisition whose profile does not have one.