What a Well-Specified Job Description Establishes
EEOC guidance on preemployment disability-related questions confirms employers may lawfully state a job’s genuine physical and functional requirements, lifting capacity, the ability to climb ladders, and ask an applicant directly whether they can meet them. The same guidance frames that up-front transparency as what makes later, qualification-based screening defensible.
That standard was written for employer compliance, not for a recruiter deciding whether to work an order, but it establishes something useful anyway: a well-specified job description states real, specific requirements clearly enough that a screening decision built on it can be defended later. A vague or inflated description fails that standard before a single candidate is even sourced.
Red Flag One: Requirements That Don’t Match the Level Offered
A job description asking for a senior-level combination of skills, years of experience, and specialized certifications, attached to a role, title, and compensation band that reads as mid-level or junior, is a mismatch worth naming out loud rather than working around. Either the requirements are inflated wish-list items nobody expects a real candidate to clear, or the client genuinely does not know what the role needs.
Both possibilities cost real time to source against. Confirming which one it is before committing recruiter hours is the entire point of screening the description first.
Red Flag Two: The Salary-to-Scope Mismatch
A description written for meaningful scope and responsibility, managing a team, owning a budget, carrying real decision authority, paired with a salary that reads as entry-level, signals a client who has not benchmarked the role against what that scope commands in the current market.
That gap does not automatically mean the order is unworkable, but it does mean the conversation needs to happen before sourcing starts, not after a strong candidate walks away over comp.
Red Flag Three: Scope That Stays Vague No Matter How Many Questions Get Asked
Some initial vagueness in a job description is normal, a client without deep recruiting experience often writes a first draft that undersells or oversimplifies what the role really involves. The red flag is scope that stays vague after a recruiter has asked direct, specific clarifying questions, not the initial vagueness itself.
A client who cannot answer what a new hire will be doing in the first ninety days, after being asked plainly, is often a client who has not finished deciding whether to hire at all, a very different problem than an order that simply needs a sharper brief.
Red Flag Four: Language That Blurs the Co-Employment Line
The American Staffing Association defines co-employment directly: “the relationship between two employers, such as a staffing firm and its client, in which each has legal rights and obligations with respect to the same employees,” and names employee benefits, workers’ compensation, and labor relations as the specific risk areas that relationship creates for the agency as well as the client.
A job description that reads like it wants a placed worker fully integrated into the client’s own supervisory and scheduling structure, indistinguishable from a direct employee in every respect but payroll, is worth flagging for exactly that reason. It is not automatically disqualifying, but it is a signal the agency’s own liability exposure on that placement deserves a closer look before the order gets worked.
Turning This Into an Actual Screening Step Instead of a Feeling
Each of the four patterns above is a specific, askable question, not a vague gut check: does the requirement list match the level offered, does the salary match the scope, does the scope stay vague after direct questions, and does the language blur who is supervising and directing this worker day to day. Running through those four questions on every new order, deliberately, before sourcing starts, turns pattern recognition into a repeatable step instead of something only an experienced recruiter catches by instinct.
A newer recruiter following the same four questions catches most of what an experienced one catches by feel, which is the actual value of writing the checklist down.
What to Do When an Order Fails the Screen
Failing one of the four checks is not automatically a reason to decline the order. A requirements mismatch or a salary gap is often fixable with one direct conversation, clarifying what the client needs and what the market commands for it. Vague scope that survives real questioning, or language that clearly blurs the co-employment line, are harder signals to work around and worth weighing more seriously before committing real sourcing time.
Either way, the decision to proceed, push back, or decline is a better decision made before hours go into sourcing than one made after a placed candidate falls through for a reason the job description quietly signaled from the start.
What this means for you
- EEOC guidance confirms a well-specified job description states real physical and functional requirements up front, the exact standard that makes later candidate screening defensible.
- Four checkable red-flag patterns: requirements that outpace the level offered, a salary-to-scope mismatch, scope that stays vague after direct questions, and language that blurs the co-employment line ASA names as a real agency liability exposure.
- No published source scores a job description for red flags directly; this checklist is original practitioner screening built on the adjacent EEOC transparency standard and ASA’s own co-employment risk framing.
Sources
The external data in this guide draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- EEOC, Preemployment Disability-Related Questions and Medical Examinations
- American Staffing Association, Co-Employment