Should I apply if I only meet 60% of the requirements?
Not on the number alone, and at 60% the honest answer is no more often than the advice suggests. What decides it is which requirements you are missing: several nice-to-haves is noise, one real screening gate is a wall.
The advice you have heard is that men apply at 60% and women apply at 100%, so everyone should apply at 60%. It is a useful corrective to hesitation and a bad rule for deciding, because it counts requirements instead of weighing them.
A posting is not a checklist of equals. It is usually a short list of things that will end your application and a long list of things somebody wrote down because they would be nice.
In practice a working line closer to three-quarters serves most people better than three-fifths. Not because the ratio is meaningful, but because at 60% you are usually missing something the role is actually screening for.
Do I have to meet every requirement?
No, and almost nobody hired for the role did either. Postings are written as a description of an ideal candidate who does not exist, then the team hires the closest real person who applied.
This is genuinely true and it is why the 60% advice caught on. The failure mode it corrects, talking yourself out of a role you could do, is real and costly.
The failure mode it creates is the opposite one. Applying to everything at 60% turns a search into a lottery and buries the two roles where you were the obvious hire.
Which requirements actually screen you out?
The ones that are verifiable, binary, and asked about before anyone reads your resume. Credentials, licences, clearances, work authorisation, degree requirements in regulated fields, and location or on-site expectations.
These are gates rather than preferences. They are usually asked as a yes or no question in the application form, which is what makes them different from everything else in the posting.
Years of experience sits in between. Two years short of a stated range is rarely fatal, while a decade short of a role built on domain depth usually is, because the gap is what the job is.
The rest of the list, the tools, the methodologies, the adjacent nice-to-haves, is where the 60% rule is right and you should apply anyway.
Is there a percentage that actually works?
As a working line, closer to three-quarters than three-fifths, and only when everything you are missing is a preference rather than a gate. The percentage is a symptom, not the test.
Three-quarters is not a threshold anybody enforces. It is useful because of what it usually means about you: at that level the things you are missing tend to be the learnable ones.
At 60% the missing quarter is large enough that something in it is often load-bearing. That is the real reason the lower line produces silence, rather than any rule a hiring team applies.
Use it as a prompt to look rather than as a score. If you are under it, the question is which specific requirement you are short on and whether that one is a gate.
What does the 60% rule get wrong?
It treats a posting as a scorecard with equal weights, which no hiring team does. The number is arithmetic on a list that was never arithmetic.
Two candidates can both hit 60% of the same posting and be in completely different positions. One is missing six tools that can be learned; the other is missing the licence the work legally requires.
It also sets the line low enough to justify almost any application. That is the failure mode the rule creates in a market where the constraint is your attention rather than your nerve.
So the useful question is not how much of the list you have. It is whether anything you are missing is the kind of thing that ends the conversation.
When is it right to pass?
When you fail a stated gate, or when the strongest thing you can say about your fit is that you could learn it. A pass is a decision that returns your evening, not an admission about your career.
Passing on the wrong roles is what makes the right ones possible. The evening you spend not applying to a role you cannot win is the evening you have available for the one you can.
That is the part most job search advice will not say out loud, because more applications is always the safer thing to tell somebody.
How the gap check separates real gaps from boilerplate →