Should you apply if you don't meet all the requirements?

There are eleven bullets under "requirements," you can honestly claim eight of them, and you're reading the whole thing like a test you have to pass, trying to work out whether the other three disqualify you or whether you're talking yourself out of something.

This article covers how job descriptions actually get written, why they overshoot, and which requirements are real gates and which ones are preferences. It also covers how to make your case when you're short something, and what to do instead when you're a long shot. Do the sorting before you write anything, because the fix for a missing degree is nothing like the fix for a missing security clearance.

The advice comes from Ethan Evans, a retired Amazon VP of 15 years who wrote his own director-level job postings and answered hundreds of hiring questions live on his Level Up show; Lauren Ipsen, who recruits senior executives at Daversa Partners and has placed around 85 of them; Matt McCloskey, who went from practicing law to running engineering and product at Twitch; and Phyl Terry, author of Never Search Alone. Every quote plays the exact moment it was said.

How the requirements list gets written

Nobody sits down and writes a job description by working out the minimum a person needs to succeed. Evans has written these postings, including a director-level role at Amazon, and he's blunt about what the list is for.

Read that again, because it changes what the document is. The list is a filter aimed high on purpose, written by someone guessing that more years means better. Then it goes through more hands. The recruiter adds the screening criteria they can search on. Legal and HR add the standard lines every posting at the company carries. Someone copies most of it from the last posting for a similar role, which was itself copied from the one before that. What lands on the careers page is a committee's wish list, and by then there's nobody left who can tell you which parts of it actually matter.

Evans has watched the effect of that list on real candidates. Reviewing the executive posting he wrote himself, he pointed at the preferred qualifications section: "There is evidence that says when you get to this part of the job post that lists all these preferred qualifications, people run away. Because if they don't have a master's degree, MBA... they see master's degree and they're like, oh, I'm out, I don't have that. Or they only have nine years of software development, so I'm going to be ruled out."

Someone with nine years reads a posting asking for ten and closes the tab. That's the filter working exactly as designed, and it's throwing out people the hiring manager would have been glad to interview.

Sort the gaps into gates and preferences

Not every missing item is the same kind of missing. Before you decide anything, go through the list and put each gap you have into one of two piles.

A gate is something the company legally cannot or commercially will not hire around. No amount of a good story moves it, and applying without it wastes everyone's morning.

If everything you're short of sits in the second pile, the question of whether to apply is already answered. Apply. If something sits in the first pile, you have a different job, which is either getting the credential or picking different targets.

What the company is actually buying

The reason preferences bend is that the list was never the point. Evans, talking about how any company decides to open a role, puts it in one sentence.

So your job when you're short a few boxes is to work out what problem the role exists to solve, and whether you can point at evidence you've solved that kind of problem before. Ipsen sees the same thing from the recruiter's side of a search, where the good ones start by working backwards from an outcome.

Every role has a major and a minor. Missing part of the major is a real problem for your application. Missing part of the minor is something a hiring manager waves through in four seconds and never thinks about again. Read the posting once for order rather than content, because the first three bullets are almost always the major, and whatever's sitting at bullet nine is filler. The positioning playbook goes deeper on reading a posting for the problem instead of the keywords.

Test whether you could do the job

"Could I do this job" is easy to answer optimistically at eleven at night with sixteen tabs open. McCloskey turns it into something you can't fudge, and the version he uses is a table.

The evidence column is the whole exercise. A yes with nothing next to it is a yes you made up. Write the specific project, the number, the thing that happened, and if you can't, mark it a no and move on.

Then count what you've got. The people who apply successfully to stretch roles almost all have the same shape: strong on the two or three things at the top, thin on the small stuff underneath. The shape that doesn't work is thin at the top and complete on everything else, because you're then a great fit for the job's minor and a stranger to its major.

How much of the job you need on day one

The honest answer is not all of it, and this is true at every level. Evans made the point while talking about how he kept adding scope to his own career, going from leading engineering to engineering and product to engineering and product and design.

What he means by moving in adjacently matters. In his own case he could clearly lead a large technology team, and the open question was whether the company would take the risk that he could also figure out the money side. That's one unknown sitting on top of a pile of proven things, and hiring managers take that bet all the time. Nobody takes it when there are three unknowns and you're a stranger.

So when you look at your table, count the nos. One meaningful gap makes you a stretch candidate, and three makes this a career change, so the career change resume playbook is the better starting point for that.

Say something about the gap yourself

Most people write around the gap and hope nobody counts. Somebody always counts. If you leave it unmentioned they fill in the reason themselves, and the reason they pick is usually that you didn't notice or you were hoping to slip through.

Naming it costs you one sentence and buys you the benefit of the doubt on everything else. The shape that works is short: what you don't have, the closest thing you do have, and the evidence.

Put this in the cover letter or the outreach note, not the resume. Your resume's job is evidence for what you can do, and a line about what you're missing sitting in the middle of your bullets just looks like an apology. The resume tailoring playbook covers what belongs on the page.

There's a second list worth making while you're at it: the gaps you keep apologizing for that nobody has ever asked about. Most people have two or three. No degree from a well-known school. A couple of years at a company nobody has heard of. A title that undersold what you were doing. Ipsen judges resumes like these for a living, and she doesn't think much of the famous-employer version either.

The candidate you're intimidated by might have been standing next to a good outcome. Yours is a smaller company with your fingerprints on everything, and that's a real answer as long as you say what you did.

When applying anyway is a waste of your time

Applying costs you fifteen minutes and a small amount of morale, so it isn't free, and there are cases where the answer is to skip it.

One thing worth saying about volume. A stretch application through the form has low odds on its own, and running twenty of them is a way to feel busy while learning nothing. Ten where you can answer the outcome question, with a person attached to each, does more.

What beats an application when you're a stretch

The form is the worst possible route for a stretch candidate, because the form is where the filter Evans described does its work. Get in front of the hiring manager instead, since the manager is the one who can decide the missing item doesn't matter. Evans is explicit about the difference, at 42:54 in the same Q&A: "Job qualifications... they're always soft and squishy. Recruiters follow them more closely than hiring managers though. So if you can make contact with a hiring manager, they're going to be interested in are you good or not, rather than what your resume says."

That's the whole argument for going around the process. The foot in the door playbook covers finding the right person, and the referral playbook covers asking someone to walk you in.

When you get the conversation, Terry has a move that works unusually well for a stretch candidate, because it argues on your terms instead of the posting's.

Terry keeps it private at first and uses the drafting to work out what questions to ask, then shares it with the hiring manager in a call rather than an email. He says a senior Amazon leader who had hired more than 2,000 product people told him nobody had ever done it, and that if someone did, he'd hire them on the spot.

For someone missing a couple of boxes this is the strongest thing you can do, because a page about what you'll deliver in the first year is a much better document to be judged on than a list of years you don't have. Terry also points out that most job descriptions are vague because the company hasn't decided what it wants, and turning up with a clear version of the answer is worth more than any credential on the list.

The last word on this belongs to Evans, because it's the thing to remember when you're deciding whether you're even allowed to apply.

Frequently asked questions

How many of the requirements do I need to meet?

There's no real number, and the percentages people quote online aren't measuring anything. What matters is which ones you meet. Meeting the top two or three and missing four of the small ones is a normal, competitive application. Meeting eight small ones and missing the top two is not, whatever the percentage works out to.

Will the applicant tracking system filter me out automatically?

Very rarely on its own. Most systems rank and search rather than reject, and a human decides. Knockout questions do exist for a handful of things, mostly work authorization, willingness to relocate, and hard credentials, which is another reason to know which of your gaps sit in the gate pile.

Should I mention the gap in the cover letter or wait until they ask?

Mention it, in one sentence, near the end. Waiting means the reader spends your whole letter noticing the thing you're not saying. Say it plainly, put your closest evidence next to it, and move on.

What if I'm short on years of experience specifically?

One or two years under is normal and usually doesn't come up. Four or five under means the level is wrong, and you're better off applying to the same job one rung lower at a bigger company, where the scope is closer to what you've handled than the title suggests.

Should I apply to two roles at the same company?

Two is fine if they're genuinely different and you'd take either. More than that in a short window and the recruiter can see it, and they'll assume you haven't decided what you do.

Does any of this change in a tight job market?

The preferences get enforced harder when there are lots of candidates, because the recruiter needs a faster way to cut the pile. That doesn't change what a hiring manager wants. It raises the value of getting to one directly instead of going through the form.

The method on one page