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Most people apply when they meet about half of a job's requirements. This guide shows which gaps to address in your cover letter and which to leave out.
Canonical: https://www.prezumi.com/blog/cover-letter-not-meeting-requirements
You can apply without meeting every requirement, and most applicants do. In your cover letter, spend the space on the requirements you do meet, with evidence for each. Address one gap at most, and only if the reader is certain to notice it. Say nothing about the rest.
The hard part is deciding which gap is which. This guide shows how to sort a job posting into what is required and what is a wish, and gives you sentences for the three gaps that come up most.
You may have heard that men apply when they meet 60% of the requirements and women only when they meet 100%. The Behavioural Insights Team traced that claim back to a comment by a Hewlett Packard executive. It was never a measured result.
The same team then tested it with more than 10,000 job seekers in the United Kingdom. They measured each person's real skills and showed them a job advert. Women applied when they met 56% of the requirements and men when they met 52%. People apply when they meet about half of the list, and that includes the candidates you are competing with.
The cover letter is where you make the case for a partial match. In a Resume Genius survey of 625 hiring managers, 49% said a strong cover letter can persuade them to interview a candidate they would otherwise pass over. In the same survey, 18% said a weak letter can sink a strong candidate.
A job posting mixes things the employer cannot do without and things they would like. The wording usually tells you which is which.
| Group | How the posting words it | What it means for your letter |
|---|---|---|
| Required | must, required, essential, minimum, you have | Cover each one you meet with a concrete example. A gap here is the only kind worth addressing. |
| Nice to have | preferred, a plus, ideally, bonus, desirable | Mention the ones you have. Stay silent on the ones you do not. |
| Unclear | listed with no label, often lower in the list | Treat the first three or four items as required and the rest as wishes. |
Three kinds of requirement are different from the rest. A licence, a legal right to work and a degree that the law demands for the job cannot be argued around. If you do not hold one of these, a good letter will not change the outcome, and the honest move is to apply once you do or once you have a date.
Prezumi's free cover letter generator helps with this step. After it writes the letter, it shows two lists: the job requirements your resume covers, and the ones the posting asks for that your resume does not clearly show.
A posting asks for five years and you have three. Years are a shortcut for the scope of work the employer expects, so answer with scope. Describe the size of what you handled: budget, team, number of clients, volume.
Before: Although I only have three years of experience instead of the five you are asking for, I believe I can do the job. After: In three years at Nordlicht I moved from supporting one account to running four, with a combined budget of €1.2 million and a team of six.
The second version never mentions the number five. It gives the reader what the five years stood for and lets them make the comparison.
The posting names a tool you have not used. Name the closest one you have used, then show how quickly you picked up something new the last time it was needed. If you have already started learning the missing tool, say what you have done so far.
Before: I have not worked with Salesforce, but I am a fast learner and I am sure I could pick it up quickly. After: I ran our pipeline in HubSpot for two years and rebuilt its reporting when we changed our sales stages. I have completed the first two Salesforce admin modules on Trailhead.
"Fast learner" is a claim anyone can make. A date, a tool and a result are things the reader can check in an interview.
You are moving from one field to another. The reader's worry is that you will need a year to understand their customers. Answer it by naming what is the same in both fields: the kind of customer, the regulation, the sales cycle, the pressure.
Before: I know I do not have experience in healthcare, but I am passionate about making the switch. After: For four years I planned staffing for a 24-hour logistics hub, where a missed shift stops the whole line. A hospital ward has the same problem, and I would like to solve it there.
Most gaps do not belong in the letter at all. The reader has your CV and will see what is missing. A letter that lists what you lack spends your one page arguing against you.
It is tempting to write that you are "familiar with" a tool you opened once. Interviews are built to test exactly these claims, and one exposed claim makes the reader doubt the true ones. Write about what you did and leave the rest out.
This is also the main risk of letting an AI tool write the letter from the job posting alone. It will happily write that you have every skill on the list. We go through the research on this in what two studies found about AI cover letters. Our generator works the other way: it writes only from your resume, and what it cannot find there goes into the second list and stays out of the letter.
This example is for a marketing analyst role that requires SQL. The applicant has used spreadsheets and a reporting tool, and has started SQL on her own.
For the past two years I have produced the weekly performance report for a team of nine, first in spreadsheets and then in Looker Studio. When the report outgrew what a spreadsheet could hold, I learned enough SQL to pull the campaign tables myself, and I now write the three queries the report runs on.
I have not yet worked in a data warehouse of your size. I would expect to spend my first weeks learning your schema, and I would bring the habit of checking every number against its source before it goes into a slide.
The first paragraph is evidence. The second names one gap in a single sentence, says what she would do about it, and moves on. That is the whole technique.
A letter can only point at what the resume shows. If the tool's second list names a skill you do have, the fix belongs on the resume first. Add the project or the line that proves it, then write the letter again.
If your work history is short, our guide to a first-job CV with no experience shows which sections can carry the page. Before you apply, run the finished resume through the free ATS resume checker, which compares it with the job description and shows the keywords it is missing. If the job is in another country, check the local form of the letter in cover letters by country.
Yes, if you meet the ones the posting labels as required or essential. In a UK experiment with more than 10,000 job seekers, people applied when they met a little over half of the listed requirements. Do not apply when the missing item is a licence, a legal right to work or a degree that the law demands for the role.
Mention one at most, and only when it is a required item the reader is certain to notice. Say it in one sentence and follow it with what you have that covers the same ground. Leave out anything the posting lists as preferred or a plus.
Do not explain it. Describe the scope of what you have done: the budget, the team size, the number of clients, the volume. Years of experience are a shortcut for scope, and a reader who sees the scope can decide for themselves.
No. The Behavioural Insights Team traced the claim to a remark by a Hewlett Packard executive and found no data behind it. In their own experiment, women applied when they met 56% of the requirements and men when they met 52%.
The phrase alone does little, because every applicant can write it. Show it instead: name something you learned for a previous job, how long it took and what you produced with it. If you have started learning the missing skill, say what you have completed.
Apply if you are within a year or two and your work has the scope the role needs. In the letter, describe that scope with numbers. Skip the application when the gap is large, for example two years of experience against a role that asks for ten.
Zubair Baqai is an AI engineer and the founder of Prezumi. He started it after researching what gets candidates interviews at companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. He writes Prezumi's guides on resumes, ATS screening and CV formats. About Prezumi