The Science of the Job Search, Part VII: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

Project Manager needed. Must have 5+ years of experience, be Six Sigma certified, have advanced deep learning knowledge, and be able to perform surgery on occasion.

Who really has all that? Turns out, basically no one. You’re as likely to get a job interview meeting 50% of job requirements as meeting 90% of them.

We were curious about how many job requirements are actually required, so we analyzed job postings and resumes for 6,000+ applications across 118 industries from our database of users. We found that while matching requirements is important, you don’t necessarily need to match all of them.

• Your chances of getting an interview start to go up once you meet about 40% of job requirements.
• You’re not any more likely to get an interview matching 90% of job requirements compared to matching just 50%.
• For women, these numbers are about 10% lower i.e. women’s interview chances go up once they meet 30% of job requirements, and matching 40% of job requirements is as good as matching 90% for women.

You only need 50% of job requirements

You’re just as likely to get an interview matching 50% of requirements as matching 90%. We saw a clear upward trend in interview rates based on matching requirements, but with an upper bound. When users applied to jobs where they matched 40 – 50% of job requirements, they were 85% more likely to get an interview than when they matched less, and applying to jobs where they matched 50 – 60% of requirements made them an extra 192% more likely to get an interview over the 40 – 50% matches.

But after that point, you’re in diminishing returns. Applying to jobs where they matched 60% or more of job requirements didn’t provide any additional boost in interview rate.

Job Search Tip #1: Apply for jobs once you match 50% of job requirements.

For women, the % of requirements required is lower

You may have seen stories before about how women in particular don’t apply for jobs unless they’re 100% qualified. We wondered if they were on to something – maybe there’s gender discrimination at play and hiring managers look for women to meet more of the requirements. Turns out, our findings apply just as much to women as to men, and actually, for women, the chances of getting an interview start increasing as soon as you meet 30% of requirements.

As you can see in the graph above, we see the same general trend for women as for men, but for women, you’re as likely to get an interview matching 40% of the job requirements as matching 90%. Note also that, as we’ve seen in previous analysis, women in general have higher interview rates than men.

Yet, despite this, among our users, we’ve observed the same trend that has been studied elsewhere. Women are more likely to turn down jobs where they match some but not all of the qualifications – over the last 8 weeks, 64% of our female users rejected at least one job where they matched 50 – 60% of the requirements, while only 37% of male users did.

So, yes, women, you too should be applying to jobs where you don’t meet all the requirements.

Job Search Tip #2: Stop second guessing yourself – you DO deserve that job.

You’re not guaranteed to get an interview, even when you match 90% of job requirements

Base case scenario, you’re looking at about a 15% chance of getting an interview. Applying for jobs is still fundamentally a numbers game – the more applications you put in, the more likely you are to get an interview, and the more interviews you have, the more likely you are to get a job offer.

Put another way, if you want to get a job offer, the number of jobs you need to apply to is a function of your interview rate (what % of applications do you get interviews for) and your job offer rate (what % of interviews do you get job offers for), specifically: # of applications needed to get n job offers = n / interview rate / job offer rate

Clearly, improving your interview rate and job offer rate pay off, but what if you can’t find 45 jobs that are perfect matches for you? It never hurts to broaden your search to jobs that feel like more of a stretch. Sure, your interview rate will be lower, but that’s balanced by applying to more jobs.

Job Search Tip #3: Apply to as many jobs as possible to increase your chances of an interview.

No time to fill in all those applications? We can help with that.

Summary

When you’re out looking for the perfect job, don’t be intimidated by a long list of requirements!

• Even if you only match 50% of the requirements, you should feel confident hitting “apply.”
• This applies just as much to women as it does to men (actually, even more so!)
• Cast an even broader net to improve your chances of getting an interview.

Remember, getting an interview is your big break – it’s your opportunity to prove that you can do the job even if you don’t meet all the “requirements.”

Methodology

First, we randomly sampled 6,348 applications for 668 different users from TalentWorks. Then we extracted the qualifications from the original job postings and the users’ submitted resumes using proprietary algorithms. Finally, we grouped the results based on qualification match and regressed the interview rate using a Bagging ensemble of Random Forest regressors. All analysis and graphing was done using python with pandas, sklearn, scipy, and bokeh.

Why Are We Doing This?

With ApplicationAssistant right now, we can boost the average job-seeker’s hireability by ~5.8x. But, what makes ApplicationAssistant work has been an internal company secret until now. We’re fundamentally a mission-driven company and we believe we can help more people by sharing our learnings. So, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Creative Commons

We’re not only sharing this but also sharing all of it under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. In other words, as long as you follow a few license terms, this means you can:

• Share: Copy, redistribute the material in any medium or format.
• Adapt: Remix, transform, and build upon the material.