The requirements you do not meet

Having produced a column of things you do not have, the next question is what it means.

The instinct is that it means do not apply. That instinct is expensive and it rests partly on a statistic that does not exist.

The claim is that men apply for a job when they meet 60 per cent of the qualifications and women apply only when they meet 100 per cent. It appears in Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, in Kay and Shipman's The Confidence Code, and in a 2014 Harvard Business Review article, all three attributing it to an internal Hewlett-Packard report. No published HP study exists. No title, no author, no year, no sample size, no methodology, no public document. Every citation trail terminates at a secondary reference to an unpublished internal file that nobody has produced.

The randomised test was run in 2022 by the Behavioural Insights Team, an online trial with 11,172 people recruited and 10,468 in the final sample. Men applied when they met 52.1 per cent of the qualifications. Women applied when they met 55.7 per cent. A gap of 3.6 percentage points, in the opposite direction to the popular version at the threshold level, and neither group waited for anything close to 100 per cent. Men showed a greater overall willingness to apply, but only among the less qualified participants; among the more qualified there was no gender difference at all.

Before the general case, the exception, because Nigerian readers meet it first and it is the one threshold on this list that is genuinely binding.

The National Youth Service Corps Act places the obligation on the employer. Section 12 requires that before employing anyone, an employer must "demand and obtain" a copy of the certificate of national service or an exemption certificate, and must produce it on demand to a police officer of assistant superintendent rank or above. That is not a preference expressed in a posting. It is a statutory duty on the person hiring you, and it is why the requirement appears without exception in Nigerian graduate advertisements.

Note the asymmetry, because it is instructive about how thresholds actually behave. The Act attaches specific penalties to individuals, including ₦5,000 or three years for forging a certificate, and attaches no comparable stated penalty to an employer who skips the check. Employers comply because of the demand-and-produce mechanism rather than because of a fine.

Now the part that turns a binding threshold into a trap. As of August 2025, more than 500,000 graduates were awaiting mobilisation into service: about 78,000 from 2022, 212,000 from 2023, 185,000 from 2024 and 65,000 from 2025, against a normal annual mobilisation of roughly 240,000 to 350,000. Corps members interviewed had graduated in 2022 and begun service in 2024, a two-year gap, with a projected backlog of 1.2 million by 2027.

Set that against the age ceilings in graduate advertisements, which run to 26 at some Nigerian banks and 28 at some professional firms. A queue you do not control is consuming the window in which you are eligible. If that is your situation, the readiness decision in Lesson 0.5 has a component that is not about you, and the honest response is to widen the set of postings rather than to work harder on one.

The other half of the picture is on the employer's side, and it is better evidenced than most things in this subject. Requirements are systematically inflated. In an analysis of 26 million job postings, 67 per cent of postings for production supervisor roles required a degree while 16 per cent of people already doing the job held one, a gap of 51 percentage points (Fuller & Raman, 2017). In a survey of 2,275 executives, 72 per cent said they reused or slightly modified an existing posting rather than writing a new one, and 47 per cent said only half or fewer of their middle-skills hires met all the requirements they had listed.

The report's own metaphor is the useful one. Requirements come to resemble the rings on a tree trunk: new ones are added to those accumulated over time, and nobody removes any.

There is a version of this that flatters the candidate and should be resisted, which is "requirements are made up, so ignore them". That is not what the evidence supports and it produces bad applications.

What it supports is a distinction, and the distinction is not new. It is the oldest split in job analysis: task-oriented analysis, which produces a description of what gets done, against worker-oriented analysis, which produces a specification of the knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics the incumbent must possess (Morgeson, Brannick & Levine, 2020). Requirements written to describe the work are load-bearing. Requirements written to reduce the pile are administrative. The first kind you must meet or bridge. The second you must get past, which is a different problem with a different solution.

Lou Adler, who has spent more than thirty years in retained search and built a hiring method around exactly this line, puts the employer's version of it more sharply than any textbook:

Adler is prescriptive. He argues employers should write activity requirements and that skills-and-experience lists filter out good people, which he states directly: skills-intensive résumés "also filter out some really good people who might be more competent, but possess a slightly different mix of skills". He does not claim that in a typical posting the activity requirements are the load-bearing ones. That reading is this course's, and it is what lets you use a badly written posting rather than complaining about it.

Employers occasionally say the quiet part themselves. The Australian National University's guidance to its own managers on writing selection criteria tells them to "decide whether minimum qualifications are essential, as many skills and abilities can be acquired without formal education", and to list any qualification not genuinely essential as desirable. That is an employer-side instruction to demote thresholds, published by an employer.

The tell is usually structure rather than content. A threshold names a level someone must have reached: a number of years, a class of degree, a certification. An activity names something the postholder will do on a Tuesday. Level 1 is entirely about telling them apart in your own posting.

One more thing, because it is the part of the story most often mis-told. The HBR article that popularised the 60 per cent claim contains its own survey of over 1,000 professionals, and its data contradicts its own headline. Asked why they had not applied for a job when they did not meet all the stated qualifications, 41 per cent of women and 46 per cent of men gave the same leading reason: they did not think they would be hired and did not want to waste their time. Only 10 per cent of women and 12 per cent of men said they did not think they could do the job well.

The barrier was almost never a belief about capability. It was a belief that stated qualifications are hard gates. That belief is wrong on the employers' own evidence, and correcting it is one of the cheapest interventions in this course.