How to read a job post like a hiring manager

I spent six years in recruiting and candidate coaching. In that time I reviewed something close to ten thousand job posts, and I wrote several hundred of them. The thing I want you to know is that most job posts are not carefully crafted documents. They are written quickly, often by someone who is also trying to fill three other roles, and the gap between what they say they want and what they actually want is usually significant.

Required versus preferred

The required/preferred split is the most useful signal in a job post and the most widely misread. Most candidates treat 'required' as a hard gate and apply only when they meet every item on the list. Most hiring managers treat 'required' as the ideal candidate and expect to hire someone who meets perhaps 70 to 80 percent of it.

The research on this is consistent: men apply when they meet 60 percent of the listed requirements, and women apply when they meet 100 percent. The hiring manager in both cases is thinking about 70 to 80 percent. The practical upshot is that 'required' is closer to 'would love to have' than to 'will not consider you without'.

If you meet 70 percent of the required qualifications and the role is genuinely interesting, apply. The question of whether you are qualified is their job to answer, not yours.

The order of the bullet points is not random

Most people writing a job post put the most important thing first. If the first required qualification is 'five or more years of experience managing cross-functional teams', that is not just the first thing on a list, it is the thing they are most worried about not finding. The further down a bullet is, the less it matters to the actual decision.

Read the first two or three required qualifications as the actual requirements. Everything after them is background noise relative to those three.

What 'culture fit' actually means

A job post that says 'you thrive in ambiguity' or 'you are comfortable with shifting priorities' is telling you something specific about the team. It is not a compliment to the future employee; it is a warning to the wrong candidate. If you have worked somewhere with strong process and clear scoping, and the post describes a team that does not have that, that is real information.

Similarly, 'fast-paced environment' usually means the team is understaffed, and 'we move fast' often means they do not have much runway and need someone who can hit the ground moving. Neither is necessarily bad; it depends on what you want. But read it as information, not as marketing copy.

Experience numbers are negotiable

When a job post says 'seven or more years of experience', it is usually written by someone who does not know exactly what they need. Seven years doing one thing is very different from seven years doing another, and the hiring manager knows that. What they actually want is someone who can do the job, and the years number is an imperfect proxy for that.

• If you have five years but your experience is directly on point, apply. Include a line in your cover letter that names the match directly.
• If you have seven years but in a different industry, that gap is probably more material than the number gap.
• Look for context clues. A job post that lists years as the first qualification cares about seniority. One that lists years fifth probably cares about skills.

The one sentence that tells you the most

The first sentence of the role description, before the bullet points, is usually the most honest thing in the document. It is written before the template takes over and the HR requirements get added. 'We are looking for a technical program manager to own the launch of our next product line' tells you more about what the job actually is than the next twenty bullets combined.

Read that sentence, believe it, and ask yourself whether the job it describes is the job you want. If yes, everything else is a filter problem you can address. If no, the bullets do not change that.