Which job requirements are genuinely mandatory

You have found a role you want. The requirements list has eight lines, you meet five of them, and you close the tab. That is the most common way a good application never gets written.

It rests on an assumption worth examining: that a requirements list is one thing. It is not. A few items on it are genuine gates, usually legal or administrative, and no amount of strong experience gets you past them. Most of the rest describe an ideal candidate nobody expects to arrive. Telling the two apart is a skill, and the posting itself usually gives you what you need to do it.

Why the list is not one list

A requirements list is rarely written in one sitting by one person. Some lines are conditions the employer cannot change. Some describe the tools the team already runs. Some are aspiration, added because the person writing was imagining the best case rather than the realistic one. They all end up under the same heading, formatted identically, which is exactly why the list reads as a single pass or fail test when it is nothing of the kind.

Reading a posting as a whole is its own skill, and one this article assumes rather than repeats. If you have not read it yet, start with how to read a job description before you apply. What follows is about one part of the page: the requirements.

Genuine gates

A small number of requirements are true conditions of employment. The right to work in a country without sponsorship. A professional licence or registration. A certification a regulator or a client obliges the employer to insist on. Security clearance for work that requires it.

These share a tell. They are phrased as facts about the job rather than qualities of a person. "Must have the right to work in the Netherlands without visa sponsorship" describes a constraint the employer is under. "Excellent attention to detail" describes someone they hope to meet. The first is a gate. The second is a wish.

If you fail a genuine gate, no amount of relevant experience routes around it, and applying anyway usually wastes your time rather than theirs. That is worth knowing in the first minute rather than the fortieth.

Requirements that describe the system

Many requirements are not about you at all. They are the team describing what it already runs: a warehouse, a framework, an orchestration layer, a particular reporting tool. The team named it because it exists and someone has to work in it on the first Monday.

That matters for how you read a gap. If a posting names one transformation tool and you have used a different one, the underlying capability is often what the team actually needs, and evidence of that capability in a neighbouring tool is worth putting in front of them. This is reasoning rather than a rule. Some teams do want the exact tool, usually because they are too small to absorb a learning curve, and nothing in the posting always tells you which situation you are in. But treating every named tool as a hard gate is a heavier assumption than the text supports.

Requirements that describe an ideal

The rest of the list is usually aspiration. It gathers toward the bottom, and it is often phrased in the language of hope: a plus, bonus points, nice to have, ideally. Years of experience frequently belongs here too, because a number of years is a proxy for judgement rather than a measure of it, and proxies are the softest part of any list.

None of this means those lines are meaningless. It means they were written to describe the strongest imaginable candidate, and a list written that way is not a threshold anyone expects every applicant to clear.

How the posting signals which is which

Three things in the text carry more information than the requirements heading itself.

• Placement. What appears in the first line of the summary, or at the top of the responsibilities, is rarely there by accident.
• Repetition. An idea that appears in the summary, again in the responsibilities and again in the requirements has been prioritised by someone, whether or not they meant to.
• Phrasing. Required, preferred, must, a plus. These words mean something, but employers do not use them consistently, so treat them as evidence rather than instruction.

Sorting one list

Here is an invented requirements list, written for this article and not taken from any real posting:

• Right to work in the Netherlands without visa sponsorship
• Three years of experience in a data role
• Strong SQL
• Experience with dbt or a similar transformation tool
• Familiarity with Looker
• Excellent communication skills
• A degree in a quantitative field is a plus

Sorted, that is one gate, three lines describing the system, and three describing an ideal. The right to work line is a condition of employment and nothing else on your CV changes it. SQL, dbt and Looker describe what this team runs, and the phrase "or a similar transformation tool" is the posting telling you outright that the capability matters more than the brand. The three years, the communication skills and the degree are the ideal, and the degree announces itself with "is a plus".

The value is not the sorting of this list. It is that you can do the same to a real one in about a minute.

What to do about a genuine gap

There is one thing never to do, and it is the thing the situation tempts people toward: do not close a gap by inventing experience. Tailoring an application means making your real evidence easier to find and easier to believe, not manufacturing a line that satisfies a requirement you have not met.

This is not only an integrity point. An invented claim tends to fail at exactly the moment it matters, because a recruiter is looking for proof rather than presence, and a claim with nothing behind it reads as thin under the same scan that would have rewarded a real one.

The better move with a gap you cannot close is to name it to yourself before you apply. If it is a gate, you have saved yourself an hour. If it is a system requirement, decide what neighbouring evidence you genuinely have and put it where it will be seen. If it is part of the ideal, it may simply not be the reason you do or do not get the interview.

A decision you can make in five minutes

Take the requirements list and do four things.

• Mark every line phrased as a condition of employment rather than a description of a person. If you fail one of those, stop here.
• Of what remains, mark what the team named because they run it. For each, ask what is the closest real evidence you have.
• Whatever is left is the ideal. It is not a threshold, and it is not a reason on its own to skip the application.
• Look at what was repeated across the posting. If you cannot evidence any of that, the honest answer may be that this is not your role yet, and knowing so is worth more than an application sent on hope.

Once the gaps are sorted, the question becomes whether your CV actually evidences the ones that count, which is where tailoring your CV to the job description starts, and what a match against the posting is for.

If you want that comparison done against one specific posting, MyRecruiterCheck checks a CV against a job description and shows which requirements your experience genuinely evidences and which it only mentions.