Job search · 7 min read

How to read a job description (and when to apply anyway)

Job descriptions are written by committee, inherited from the last person who held the role, and padded by whoever wanted the posting to sound senior. Reading them literally is the single most common reason good candidates do not apply for jobs they would get.

There is a real skill in reading one properly: separating the requirements that will actually filter you out from the ones nobody will check, and spotting the language that tells you what the job is really like. Both are learnable and neither takes long.

The two kinds of requirement

Every posting contains knockouts and wishlist items, usually mixed together in the same bulleted list. Knockouts are conditions that end an application regardless of everything else: work authorisation, a legally required licence or qualification, sometimes a location or a security clearance. These are checked, often by a form before a human is involved, and no amount of enthusiasm survives them.

Wishlist items are everything else. The languages, the frameworks, the years, the nice-to-haves and the increasingly long list of tools. These are aspirational, they are frequently copied from a previous posting, and hiring managers routinely make offers to people who miss several.

The practical move is to sort the list before you decide anything. If you fail a knockout, move on without spending an evening on the application. If you only miss wishlist items, the question becomes how many and which — not whether to apply at all.

What "3-5 years of experience" actually means

Less than it appears. Years are a proxy for judgement, and a poor one — a hiring manager cares whether you have solved this class of problem before, not how many calendar months elapsed while you did.

In practice, a posting saying three to five years is describing a level rather than a threshold, and people who are visibly operating at that level are hired with two. The exceptions are regulated professions and organisations with rigid banding, often larger corporates and public sector, where years genuinely are checked because the salary band requires it.

The useful test is whether you can point at work that looks like what the role needs. If you can, the number is negotiable. If you cannot, the number is not really the problem.

The research on applying anyway

There is a widely repeated claim that men apply when they meet around 60% of the criteria while women apply only at 100%. The underlying finding is real enough to take seriously, though the popular version has hardened into a statistic that outruns the evidence, and the most cited explanation is not confidence but a belief that the requirements are literal rules rather than guidance.

That belief is the thing to correct. The requirements are not rules. The people writing them know they are not rules. Applying when you meet most of what matters is normal behaviour, not an imposition on anyone's time, and the cost of being wrong is a form email.

A reasonable heuristic: apply if you clear every knockout and meet roughly two-thirds of the substantive requirements, and if you can describe how you would handle the parts you have not done.

Read the responsibilities before the requirements

The requirements list is the least reliable section. The responsibilities describe what you would actually spend your time on, and they are written by someone closer to the work.

Read them and ask what the job is really for. A posting whose responsibilities are dominated by stakeholder alignment and reporting is a coordination job however technical the requirements sound. One that talks about building from scratch, ambiguity and being the first hire in an area is describing autonomy and risk. These distinctions matter far more to whether you will enjoy the role than the tooling list does.

Language that tells you something

Some phrases are reliably informative once you know to look. Wears many hats and fast-paced environment usually mean under-resourced, which can be an opportunity or a treadmill depending on your appetite. Rockstar, ninja and similar language tends to correlate with a certain kind of culture and a certain age of company.

Must be comfortable with ambiguity is honest and worth taking at face value: it means the role is not defined and you will be defining it. We are looking for someone who can hit the ground running usually means there is nobody available to onboard you.

Watch for scope that does not fit one person. A posting asking for a data engineer, an analyst and a dashboard designer is describing three jobs, and whoever takes it will do all three. That is not automatically bad early in a career, when breadth is valuable, and it is exhausting later.

The things a posting does not say

Absences are informative too. No salary range, in a market where ranges are increasingly published or required, is a choice. No mention of the team you would join often means the team is not settled. A long list of what they want and nothing about what the role offers is a small signal about how they think about the exchange.

None of these are reasons not to apply. They are questions to ask on the screening call, where the recruiter usually answers them straightforwardly.

Reposted and evergreen postings

A posting that has been open for several months is worth understanding before you invest in it. Sometimes the role is genuinely hard to fill. Sometimes the requirements are unrealistic and nobody has adjusted them. Sometimes the company keeps a pipeline posting open with no live vacancy at all, which is legal and common and wastes a great deal of candidate time.

Check the posting date where it is shown, and ask on the first call whether the role is newly opened, a backfill or an ongoing pipeline. The answer changes how much of your effort it deserves.

Using the posting after you decide to apply

Once you are applying, the description becomes your source material. The phrasing it uses is the phrasing your resume should echo where it is honestly true — not keyword stuffing, but making sure that if they call it stakeholder management and you called it client relationships, the words they are looking for appear somewhere real.

The responsibilities section is also where your interview preparation starts. Whatever it emphasises most is what you will be asked about, and the closest example from your own work is the story worth having ready before the first call.

The short version

Sort the list into knockouts and wishlist before anything else, and only knockouts should stop you. Treat years as a description of level rather than a threshold. Read the responsibilities more carefully than the requirements, because that is the actual job. Apply if you clear the knockouts and meet most of what matters — the requirements were never rules, and the people who wrote them know it.

Salary ranges, where they are published

A growing number of markets require a range on the posting, and where one exists it is more informative than it looks. A very wide band — the kind spanning forty or fifty percent — usually means the level is not settled and the company is willing to hire at either end depending on who turns up. That is an opportunity if you interview well and a warning if you need certainty about level.

A narrow band near the top of market usually signals a company that has decided what it wants and will not stretch. A band conspicuously below comparable postings is worth taking at face value rather than assuming it is negotiable, because published ranges are typically approved by finance rather than aspirational.

Where no range is published, ask on the first call. Doing so is normal, and a recruiter who cannot or will not indicate a band after being asked twice is telling you something.

Titles are not comparable across companies

The same title means genuinely different things at different organisations, and this trips up otherwise careful candidates in both directions. A senior engineer at a two-hundred-person startup and at a large bank may be separated by five years of expected experience. A manager title sometimes means people report to you and sometimes means you own a workstream.

Read the responsibilities to calibrate the title rather than the other way round. If the posting describes work you have done and calls it a level above your current title, apply — the inflation runs in your favour. If it calls it a level below, the work still matters more than the label, though the salary band probably follows the label.

The ones worth not applying to

Very little in a posting should stop you, but a few things reasonably do. A role that has been reposted continuously for a year with unchanged wording. A description whose responsibilities span three unrelated jobs at a company small enough that you would clearly do all of them. Anything requiring you to pay for training, equipment or certification as a condition of the role, which is a reliable marker of a scam or something close to it.

Beyond those, the default should be to apply. The asymmetry is stark: an application costs you twenty minutes, and the job you did not apply for costs you the job.

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