Should you apply for a job if you don't meet 100% of the qualifications?

Do people apply for jobs even if they don’t meet all of the qualifications listed on a job advertisement?

There’s been sizable reporting over the past decade — some based on a Hewlett-Packard internal report cited in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead — that suggests men are likely to apply to a job if they meet just some of the listed job requirements, while women are only like to apply if they meet 100%.

Tara Sophia Mohr suggested in an August 2014 Harvard Business Review article that a greater reason women don’t apply for jobs where they don’t meet all the qualifications is not chiefly from a lack of confidence, but more from not wanting to waste their time applying if the hiring company was likely to rule their application out.

There remains an unevenness in who will apply to a job posting based on the assumptions about the listed qualifications. Too often, someone who might have done a great job but hesitated to apply learns of someone else getting the job who seemed to have far fewer of the listed qualifications than she did.

Perhaps this is more common that I believe it to be, but when I happened upon a job description for a Deputy Style and Standards Editor at Vox Media recently, it struck me that the company made a strong effort to make it clear to prospective employees that they should apply even if they didn’t meet every listed qualification. (Full disclosure: I came upon the Vox ad because a former graduate student who would be this person’s boss posted it on her LinkedIn feed.)

“If you think you have what it takes,” the Vox ad read in the “Who You Are” section, “but don't meet every single point in our job posting, please apply with a cover letter to let us know how you believe you can bring your unique skills to the Vox Media team or get in touch!” The ad went on to point out that Vox has hired “chefs who became editors, DJs who became UX designers, and sommeliers who became writers.”

It may seem a small thing, and more companies than Vox may be running such “apply anyway” type codicils on their job ads, but it strikes me as a good thing for companies to try to be more transparent with prospective applicants who don’t meet all of the qualifications but who make a compelling hire nonetheless.

The end result could be to encourage more people to apply who might have ruled themselves out of a job before they were even considered. It also might result in companies ending up hiring strong people who might never have applied.

Making it clear that an employer will consider people and all they have to bring to a job — even if some of that “all that” is not listed in the job ad —could also result in companies ending up with someone about whom they might never have known. If companies truly mean they will consider applicants who don’t meet 100% of the listed qualifications, then clarity about that willingness on their job ads is the right thing to do.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

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