Must-Have vs Nice-to-Have: Who Actually Believes the List

The posting for a Senior Validation Engineer at an eVTOL company listed nine items under the heading Required. Item six was five years of DO-178C experience. On a Thursday afternoon, a test engineer with seven years of automotive hardware-in-the-loop validation read that line, counted the eight others she clearly met, and closed the tab. Nine out of nine, she assumed, was the bar. She had never worked on certified flight software, so she did not apply.

Forty minutes later, in a conference room two time zones away, the hiring manager for that role told his recruiter that DO-178C was really a nice-to-have. The team already had a certification lead. What he needed was someone who had built a test rig from nothing and kept it running through a launch. The recruiter wrote that down. The posting did not change.

The list said required. The manager meant preferred. The candidate believed the list, the recruiter half believed the manager, and the only person who knew which lines were real was the one person who never reads his own posting.

From the candidate's chair

A candidate reading a requirements list has almost nothing else to go on. The mission paragraph sounds like every other mission paragraph. The responsibilities are written in the future tense. The list is the only part of the posting that looks like a fact, so it gets read like one. When a line says required, a careful candidate takes the word at face value, because there is no way to ask the posting what it meant.

Candidates have also heard the opposite advice for years: job descriptions are wish lists, apply anyway. That advice is half right, and the half that is wrong costs people. Some lines are absolute. An active security clearance, US person status for export-controlled work, a professional license, an FAA certificate: those are gates set by law or by a customer contract, and no manager can waive them. A candidate who applies past those lines wastes a screen and sometimes burns a relationship with a recruiter who will remember the name.

So candidates usually get it wrong in one of two directions. The careful ones read every line as a gate and talk themselves out of roles they would win. The confident ones read every line as a suggestion and apply to roles they cannot legally hold. Both are guessing, because both are missing the same thing.

What a candidate cannot see is how the list was assembled. It looks like one person's considered judgment. In practice it is usually a merge: lines carried over from the last requisition, two items the manager said in intake, a standard block from HR, and one tool a senior engineer on the panel insisted on. Nobody ranked them. The formatting makes them look equal, and they are not.

From the hiring team's chair

For the hiring manager, the list is written at the most optimistic moment in the whole process. In the intake meeting, the role is still imaginary, and the imaginary candidate has everything. Adding a line costs nothing. Nobody in the room says that each requirement removes people from the pipeline, so the list grows until it describes the person who left, plus everything that person was missing.

The manager does not experience the list as a contract. In his head it is a direction. He knows he will flex at the offer stage, and he usually does. When a strong referral walks in without one of the required items, he says the line was always negotiable, and in his mind it was.

The recruiter lives under a different constraint. Every candidate the recruiter passes to the manager is a judgment that can be questioned in the debrief. Sending someone who is missing a required item invites the question, why did you send me this person? Screening to the letter of the list is the safe move, so the recruiter enforces lines the manager would personally waive. Then the applicant tracking system enforces them again, because someone turned a few of those lines into knockout questions that reject an application before any person reads it.

What the hiring team usually gets wrong is assuming everyone knows the list is soft. What they cannot see is the people who never applied. The pipeline report shows who came in. It does not show the engineer who closed the tab on a Thursday afternoon. A manager looking at a thin pipeline concludes that the market is thin, when the market read his list and believed it.

Where it breaks

The requirements list is believed by everyone except the person who wrote it. The candidate reads it literally because there is no other information. The recruiter enforces it literally because that is defensible. The screening software applies it literally because that is all software can do. Only the manager reads it as a draft, and the manager is the one reader who never sees it work.

That creates an asymmetry I have watched play out across more than a thousand hires. The list is applied strictly to strangers and loosely to people the team already knows. Referrals, former colleagues and candidates someone on the panel vouches for get the flexible version. Applicants get the literal one. The result is a pattern any recruiter will recognize: the person who finally gets hired often misses two of the listed requirements, while dozens of applicants were turned away for missing one.

The market makes the cost of that worse. The Mobility Jobs board carries 29,300+ open roles across 179 companies right now, and 14,100+ of them are engineering roles, which is nearly half the board. Thousands of new postings arrive every week. A strong engineer is not choosing between applying to your role and doing nothing. She is choosing between your role and the one at the company next door whose list was shorter or more honest. A false requirement does not just shrink your pipeline. It sends your best candidate to a competitor who wrote the same job more clearly.

The answer is not simply a shorter list. A short list that does not separate gates from preferences still forces candidates to guess. The answer is a list that tells the truth about its own structure. Every requirements list I have seen work in mobility hiring had three kinds of lines in it, whether or not anyone labeled them: legal and contractual gates that cannot move, two or three lines that describe the actual work, and preferences. The failure is presenting all three in one undifferentiated column under a single heading.

When I was helping scale Fisker from under 300 to 1,700+ people, the requisitions that filled fastest were not the ones with the most impressive requirements. They were the ones where the manager had been forced, in intake, to say out loud which lines would actually end a candidacy.

What to do differently

If you are the candidate

• Sort the list yourself before you decide. Put clearance, citizenship, export-control and license lines in one pile and respect them absolutely. Find the two or three lines that describe the work you would actually do in the first six months. Everything else is probably a preference.
• Apply when you clear the gates and the core work, even with gaps elsewhere. Missing a tool or a domain you can learn is a normal hire. Missing a legal gate is not.
• Name your gap before anyone else does. In your note or your first screen, say plainly which listed item you do not have and point to the closest thing you have done. A named gap reads as judgment. A hidden one reads as a surprise.
• Ask the recruiter one direct question. "If you had two finalists and one did not have this item, would that end it?" Recruiters can usually answer that honestly, and the answer tells you which lines are real.
• Answer knockout questions truthfully. Stretching an answer to get past a screening question tends to unravel in the interview. If a truthful answer would screen you out of a role you could do, reach the recruiter or the manager directly instead.

If you are the hiring team

• Make the manager rank every line in intake. For each item, ask whether you would reject an otherwise excellent finalist without it. Only the yes answers belong under Required.
• Label the three kinds of lines in the posting. Separate the legal gates, the core of the work, and the preferences. Candidates will self-select far more accurately when the list tells them which is which.
• Audit your knockout questions against the ranked list. If a screening question rejects people for a line the manager just called a preference, the software is enforcing a requirement nobody holds.
• Give the recruiter written permission to flex. Agree in intake which lines the recruiter may waive without asking. That removes the incentive to screen to the letter.
• Compare every hire to the original list. After the offer is signed, note which requirements the hire actually met. Update the template so the next requisition starts from what you really hire for.

The eVTOL requisition stayed open for another seven weeks. It closed when a panel member referred a former colleague: an automotive hardware-in-the-loop engineer who had built two test rigs from nothing and had never touched DO-178C. The manager called it a great hire, and it was. Somewhere, the engineer who closed the tab on that Thursday afternoon was starting a job at another company, one whose list had said what it meant.