Hey Little Pineapple,

You've probably heard the Hewlett-Packard famous finding, even if you don't know it's them.

It's been in TED talks. Leadership books.
Repeated at HR conferences like a god damn gospel.

Hell, even Sheryl Sandberg put it in her book Lean In.

The claim: women apply for jobs when they meet 100% of requirements, men apply at 60%.

There's just one problem: nobody can find the original study.

Because it doesn't exist.

It was an internal anecdote at HP that someone repeated until it calcified into a statistic.

And when the Behavioural Insights Team (company doing actual research for a living) tested it, properly, with 10,000+ participants, they found women applied at 56% qualification match, men at 52%.

The gap is almost nothing.

But that's not even the interesting part.

The finding that actually matters

Harvard researcher Katherine Coffman took a group of objectively qualified candidates, put them in two groups and gave each of them a different version of the same job posting.
​
Same role, same people.

The only difference was that one posting was vague: "we're looking for an expert in this area."
The other was specific: defined years of experience, concrete skills, clear criteria.

Results? Insane.

Vague posting: 6% of qualified candidates applied.
Specific posting: 29% applied.

Nearly five times (!) more qualified applicants, just from defining the bar clearly.

Now here's another interesting question: who do you think applied when the requirements were vague?

People who rounded up.
The ones who read "expert," thought close enough, and hit send.

The people who didn't apply were accurate self-assessors.
They saw "expert," started mentally mapping their gaps, and talked themselves out of it.

The more precisely you know your own skill level, the easier it is to disqualify yourself from a role you could actually do.

If you've been in this industry long enough to have real opinions about your craft, you're more likely to be in that second group than you think.

What this means when you're reading job posts

That wall of bullet points: 10+ years experience, shipped multiple AAA titles, Unreal expert, strong leadership, excellent communicator, passionate about games, is not a requirements list. It's a wish list nobody edited.

In my experience placing senior roles across studios, most hiring managers are comfortable at 60–70% match on the list they wrote, and they wrote the other 30% because nobody in the room said "do we actually need all of this?"

There's also a direct link to your own materials.

Coffman's finding cuts both ways: vague job posts lose 80% of qualified applicants.

But a vague CV, LinkedIn profile, or portfolio does the same thing in reverse.

People aren't sure what they're looking at, it feels like a risk, and hiring managers are extremely good at avoiding unnecessary risk.

Specificity is what gets you read.

3 things to do with this

Read for the real job, not the full list. The actual role is in the first three or four bullet points. Everything below is usually aspirational noise. Find the core problem they're trying to solve and ask yourself honestly if that's you.

Apply the 70% rule deliberately. If you're hitting 70% and the core is in your wheelhouse, send the application. Not because you're bluffing, but because the other 30% was probably never a hard requirement, and your job in the interview is to show how your experience maps to what they actually need.

Make vague posts work for you. When a post is deliberately unclear, someone has to define the bar. And that's where you come in. Early in the interview, ask: "What does success in this role look like in the first six months?" Now they're telling you exactly what they need, and you're picking from your experience to match it.

Little Pineapple, go apply for the thing.

You're more qualified than you think.

Patryk

P.S. If you're sitting on a role you're not sure about, reply and tell me what's giving you pause. I read everything and reply personally.