You Don't Have to Be Ready for Every Opportunity

Most of us can name an opportunity we read once, felt a flicker of interest in, and then closed. The page stayed open in a tab for a day or two while a quiet list started to build. You had not done this exact job before. You were not sure what you would say in the first email. Someone else, surely, was a better fit, and the tab was gone by the end of the week, along with the idea.

Some of those concerns are worth examining. A role might require a license you do not hold, or a start date that does not fit your life right now. Other times the list is a standard we set for ourselves that no one else asked us to meet. We expect to know everything before we have begun, which is the one moment when nobody knows everything. Telling the two apart is a skill, and it can be learned.

What the numbers say about holding back

You may have seen the statistic that men apply for a job when they meet about 60% of the qualifications, while women apply only when they meet all of them. Writer and women's leadership coach Tara Sophia Mohr quoted it in Harvard Business Review in 2014, attributing it to an internal Hewlett Packard report. Mohr doubted that confidence was the whole story, so she surveyed more than a thousand men and women, mostly professionals in the United States. She asked each of them why they had skipped a job when they did not meet every qualification. Only a small share of either group said they did not think they could do the job well. The most common answer for both men and women was that they did not expect to be hired without the listed qualifications and did not want to waste their time and energy.

Two differences did appear between the groups. Almost one in four women said their main reason was not wanting to put themselves out there if they were likely to fail, compared with 13% of men. Fifteen percent of women said they simply followed the guidelines, compared with 8% of men. Mohr's conclusion was that people were treating a job posting as a strict set of rules, when many of those lists work more like a wish list. As she put it in an interview with Next Avenue, a posting can reflect a team's early thinking about the person they want, and that thinking may change by the end of the interviews. The hesitation, in other words, often comes from how we read the page and not from how we see ourselves.

LinkedIn's 2019 Gender Insights Report adds a second angle. Women and men browse jobs in similar ways, yet women apply to 20% fewer of them, and they are 16% more likely than men to be hired once they do apply. That figure rises to 18% when the role is more senior than the one they hold now. The same report found that recruiters who reviewed candidate profiles saw women as just as qualified as men. These numbers describe large groups of people and cannot promise anything about a single application. They do suggest that a good number of the women who stayed out of the process would have fared well inside it.

What ready looks like

Being ready tends to have three parts. The first is understanding what the opportunity requires, which means reading past the length of the list to the substance of it. The second is recognizing what you already bring, including skills that come from other work, other industries, or unpaid roles. The third is a willingness to learn what you do not know yet, which is a different thing from already knowing it.

A practical way to start is to take the posting and sort it into two columns. In the first, put the items that are truly fixed, such as a license, a legal requirement, or a degree for regulated work. In the second, put the items that read like preferences, such as a number of years, a specific tool, or a familiar industry. Then ask someone. Next Avenue's writer suggests finding a person who works at the organization, perhaps a LinkedIn contact, and asking candidly whether the requirements are really required.

Finally, connect your experience to theirs in plain words. Mohr described a client with a strong marketing background who applied for a fundraising role that asked for at least ten years of development experience. In her cover letter, the client explained that relationship building, communications, and sales, the core skills of development work, were the same ones she had built over her career, and she got the job. You can do the same in a cover letter, a short call, or the first few minutes of an interview. Add one sentence about what you would learn first and how, so the person reading sees both your starting point and your direction.

When the answer is not this one

None of this means every opportunity is for you. Mohr herself noted that sometimes the listed qualifications are truly required, and she encouraged women to apply when the job is something they feel excited about. If a role needs a certification you do not have and cannot get in time, passing on it is a clear decision and not a failure of nerve. The title of this piece works in both directions, because you do not have to be ready for every opportunity, and you also do not have to disqualify yourself from the ones that matter. What changes the outcome is that the decision comes from looking closely at the opportunity and not from the list that starts in your head.

Before you close the tab

The next time something catches your attention, give the tab ten more minutes than usual. Sort the posting, write down three things you already bring, and name one thing you would be glad to learn. If you can, send one message to someone who knows the place from the inside. After that, you will be deciding with information in front of you, and whichever way you go, the choice will belong to you.