Must-have vs nice-to-have job requirements

Search for the difference between a must-have and a nice-to-have and you will mostly find advice for hiring teams: how to decide which requirements to put in a posting, how to avoid over-specifying, how to keep a shortlist workable.

Useful, but backwards. The person who has to make this judgement most often, under the most time pressure and with the least information, is the applicant — and they are making it several times an evening.

The good news is that the signalling is more consistent than it looks, because the people writing postings are largely copying conventions from each other.

Sections headed Requirements, Qualifications, What you'll need, or Minimum qualifications contain the strongest signals. Sections headed Preferred, Bonus points, Nice to have, or It would be great if are — with striking consistency — exactly what they say.

Inside the strong section, the wording still grades itself:

• Hard: must, required, essential, you will need, candidates without X will not be considered. Also anything naming a legal or contractual condition — a right to work, a licence, a clearance, a professional registration.
• Firm but negotiable: strong experience with, proven track record in, demonstrated ability to. Real expectations, and the ones a good application answers directly — but a screener is judging them, not a checkbox.
• Soft, wherever it appears: familiarity with, exposure to, an understanding of, ideally, plus, advantage, bonus, or a plus. These are shopping lists. They very rarely decide anything.

The awkward middle is a years-of-experience figure. It sits in the hard section and reads like a gate, and in practice it is usually a screening convenience rather than a rule — which is why it is worth its own answer: should you apply if you don't meet all the requirements?

Wording is a good first pass. When it is ambiguous — and it often is, because the same posting will call something essential in one line and preferred in another — fall back on a harder question: could a stranger, holding only your CV, answer this line yes or no without talking to you?

Lines that pass that test are the ones that can be used to screen at volume, so they are the ones that will be. A right to work in a country, a named certification, a specific degree, a language the role is conducted in: binary, external, unarguable.

Lines that fail it cannot screen anybody, whatever section they were printed in. Nobody is filtered out of a pile for insufficient attention to detail, because nobody can measure it from a document.

Beyond the words, the shape of the list carries information.

1. Position. The first two or three lines of a requirements list are usually the hiring manager's; the tail accumulates. Weight the top.
2. Repetition. Something that appears in the title, in the accountabilities and again in the requirements is the job. Something named once, late, is a preference.
3. Specificity. A named version, tool, framework or regulation was written by somebody with a particular problem in mind. A broad category — experience with modern tooling — was written to fill a line.

Two rules follow, and they are the whole practical point of the exercise.

First, answer the hard lines explicitly. If a genuine gate is met, say so plainly and early — do not make a reader infer it from a job title three roles down your CV.

Second, do not spend words on the soft ones. Space given to a bonus-points line is space taken from an accountability, and the accountabilities are what the interview will be about. How to decide which jobs are worth applying for puts this step in the wider sequence.