Should you apply if you don't meet every qualification?

Usually yes: you should apply if you don't meet all the qualifications, on one condition. A job description mixes two kinds of line: a few that are real gates, and many that describe a person the employer would be pleased to find. If you clear the gates and can show you have done the core of the work, apply. If you miss a gate, move on, however good the rest looks.

The hard part is telling the two apart. Before that, it helps to clear away a statistic you have almost certainly heard.

The claim is that men apply when they meet 60 percent of the qualifications and women only at 100 percent. It is repeated everywhere. Its origin is thin: a 2014 Harvard Business Review article describes it as coming from an internal Hewlett Packard report, later quoted in popular books and dozens of articles.^[1] The Behavioural Insights Team, a research organisation that went looking for the source, reports that it is likely based on a speculative comment by a senior executive, not on quantitative data.^[2]

When that team tested it in an online experiment with more than 10,000 job seekers, the gap was real but small: men applied when they were 52 percent qualified, women at 56 percent, and the difference appeared only among less-qualified participants.^[2]

Two other findings are more useful to you, whoever you are:

• The Harvard Business Review author surveyed more than a thousand professionals who had skipped a job for this reason. The least common explanation was "I didn't think I could do the job well", chosen by about 10 percent of women and 12 percent of men. The most common, for 41 percent of women and 46 percent of men, was that they did not think they would be hired without the qualifications and did not want to waste their time.^[1] People were not doubting themselves. They were reading the list as a rulebook.
• LinkedIn's own platform data from 2018 found that women applied to 20 percent fewer jobs than men, and were 16 percent more likely to be hired after applying.^[3] Being selective is not the same as being unqualified. (The same LinkedIn report repeats the 60 and 100 percent claim, which shows how far it has travelled.)

Less than the wording suggests, and more than you can ignore. In a 2021 Harvard Business School survey of 2,275 executives in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, 88 percent agreed that qualified high-skills candidates are vetted out of the process because they do not match the exact criteria in the job description. For middle-skills roles the figure was 94 percent.^[4]

That is employers saying their own lists exclude people who could do the job. The same report explains how: more than 90 percent of the employers surveyed use recruiting software to filter or rank candidates at the start, often on specific items such as a degree, a professional licence or a certification.^[4]

So both things are true. The list overstates what the job needs, and some lines on it are switches that remove you before a person reads your resume. Your job is to work out which lines are switches.

This table is our reading of how postings are written, not a rule employers follow. When a line is ambiguous, the application form often settles it: a question that asks "Do you have X? Yes or No" is usually a gate.

You will see thresholds quoted: 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent. We could not find research that tests any of them against who gets hired, so we will not give you one. The experiment above shows only what people do, which is apply at a little over half.^[2]

A better test than a percentage:

1. Do I clear every hard gate?
2. Can I point to something I have actually done for most of the core duties?
3. Would I take this job at the level and pay it is likely to carry?

Three yeses is enough to apply. A fit score can help you sort a long list. Final Resume gives each posting a 1 to 5 score with a one-line reason judged against your resume, and it is an AI's opinion: read the reason, then decide yourself.

• Take one posting you talked yourself out of this week. Mark each requirement as gate, core, proxy, wish or boilerplate. See what is actually left.
• Put the core duties at the top of your resume in the posting's own words where they are true of you. Filters and tired readers both look for the exact criteria.^[4]
• Name the gap once, plainly, if it is obvious. One sentence on what you have done instead is better than hoping nobody notices.
• Never claim a qualification you do not have. Tick "No" on a gate question when the answer is no.
• Keep a note of what you skipped and why. If the reason is always "I didn't think they would hire me", that is the rulebook reading again.^[1]