Half the criteria: what to do with the half you have

Most applicants meet some of the list. The useful question is which half you meet and whether your document proves it.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-13

— prove the half you have, name the half you do not.

Almost nobody meets a full list. The question worth answering is narrower: which items can you evidence, is that evidence on the page, and is the remainder a wish or a legal requirement.

First, find out what your document says

People decide they are unqualified on the basis of a document that undersells them. Run the ATS checker and read the content row: action-led lines, measurable evidence, depth across roles. A document scoring nothing on those rules is not evidence of a weak career, and a weak fixture in this estate measured exactly that way while describing real work.

Second, mark the list honestly

For each requirement, name the line that proves it. If there is no line but there is a memory, that is a writing job rather than a qualification problem, and evidence you forgot you had is the page for it. If there is no memory either, it is a genuine gap.

Third, separate the gaps by kind

A missing registration is a wall. A missing tool is a Tuesday. Most lists mix both, which is the subject of requirements that are really preferences. Walk away from the walls and stop treating the Tuesdays as walls.

What the letter does with the remainder

The cover letter builder selects evidence out of your own résumé for the requirements you can support, and lists the rest as gaps. It does not invent a reason for wanting the job and it does not claim a skill your evidence does not show. On a measured run it named two requirements the evidence could not support, and asserted neither. That refusal is described in why a letter only claims what the résumé shows.

What to do with a named gap

Three honest options. Say nothing, which is usually right for a minor tool. Say what is adjacent, if you have real adjacent evidence. Or prepare an answer for the interview, which is what the list is most useful for. Reading your own gaps list walks through that decision.

The application that is worth writing

One where the evidence you have maps onto the work described in the advert's first paragraphs rather than onto its wish list. That is a different test from counting bullet points, and it is why the first pass in how to read a job posting ignores the requirements entirely.

The sentence worth writing, if you write one

Where a central requirement is missing and you have genuine adjacent evidence, one sentence naming both is defensible: what you have done that is close, and the plain fact that the named thing is not in your history. Two properties make it work. It is checkable, because the adjacent evidence is on the résumé. And it does not ask the reader to take anything on trust. What fails is the version that implies equivalence without saying so, because the reader notices the manoeuvre and stops trusting the rest of the letter.

What this page does not claim

That applying anyway works, or that it does not. There is a familiar piece of advice about applying when you meet some proportion of a list, usually quoted with a statistic attached, and we have no data of our own about it and will not repeat somebody else's. What is defensible is the process: evidence what you have, name what you do not, and do not send an application into a hard requirement.

One more practical point about the order of work, because it saves a lot of wasted evenings. Fix the document before you decide about the advert. A résumé that fails to extract, or that describes six years of work in four vague lines, will make you feel unqualified for jobs you can do, and that feeling is very hard to argue with while looking at the page. An hour spent on the evidence changes the document and the decision at the same time, which is what taking a résumé from 40 to 97 shows on a real pair of measurements.

One last observation about how people actually use lists like this. The requirement that stops somebody applying is usually the most specific one on the page, because specificity reads as seriousness. A named framework feels like a wall and a vague line about stakeholder management does not, even where the second is closer to the real job. Reading the described work first, before the list, corrects that bias, which is why the method in how to read a job posting puts the requirements in its second pass rather than its first.