If it’s a Government job, then don’t bother. If they say they want someone who can program a ZAX-3002 series mainframe, is fluent in Portuguese, and is fond of owls, and you can program every ZAX mainframe ever made, you breed owls and have written a book entitled Owls: The Complete Guide (recognised by the World Society For Owls as being the definitive work on the subject), but you can speak Spanish instead of Portuguese, then you won’t get the job, so don’t bother applying.
There is a difference between having experience and knowledge. If I’m one short on something where they want experience, I’ll send the resume anyway and let it come out at the interview if everything else matches up.
I never used to do that–especially since what I’m looking for requires several different computer programs–UNTIL I went on an interview where it was clear that THEY lied about the job. Big time.
Now I feel that I shouldn’t eliminate myself; let them.
But why?? Surely they realize that giving a list of totally unrealistic requirement loses them a chance to bring in qualified people who feel that they couldn’t possibly be a good match for the company because they lack skills in program X.
I can tell you how our company hires programmers. The manager writes out the requirements. HR does all of the advertising, etc. When the resumes come in, HR matches them up against the requirements. If you are missing any, your resume gets tossed. It doesn’t matter if you would be the best possible programmer the company has ever seen for that position. The HR folks don’t know how to evaluate your skills. They just go by a checklist. Only the resumes that pass the checklist go to the manager to interview.
If you are lacking one of the requirements, making it obvious that you are lacking one of them is going to get you kicked out at the HR level. If you want to get past the HR filter, list the requirements you do have, and keep quiet about the one you don’t. Tell the manager when you get to the interview stage, and then you and he can work out whether or not it’s really an issue.
I’m not sure. I think it’s kind of the same reason people go crazy on dating sites and list the requirements for what they think is the perfect, and unrealistic, mate. They think that the Internet will magically search through the web and pull them out.
I would be laughing heartily if it weren’t so goddamned true. 
Then they give the job to the Director’s aunt, who has none of the pre-reqs.
Because why not? People will apply for the job anyway.
Responding to Monster.com ads is a terrible way to job search anyway. The HR process is designed so that a team of simpletons can find replacement cogs they can pay $46k a year.
My experience has usually been that Government jobs either go to the person who is currently filling them in a “Temporary” capacity, or there’s been a budget change and the position gets appended to someone else’s job description.
All of which is made the more irritating by the fact that, IMHO, there’s more work involved in applying for a Government job than there is in writing an Academic Essay, so it’s especially frustrating to put all that work into it (making sure it’s in the right font and you’ve got your Applicant Information on every. single. page, and it’s all numbered and you’ve provided three hard copies, attached with a single staple (not a paperclip, and not bound), along with an electronic copy) only to be told three days after the submission deadline “We have given the position to the person who’s been doing this job for two years in a temp capacity but we’re legally obliged to waste everyone’s time by advertising the position externally anyway even though we’re not going to hire an external candidate”, or hearing a month later that “due to budgetary changes, this position is being incorporated into an existing role”.
It’s certainly put me off applying for Government jobs, no matter how qualified I might be for them.
Thank you to everyone who responded. I might try applying for some of these jobs where I’m just one skill short.
Employers want somebody who A) they don’t need to train and B) will work for entry wages. The person usually doesn’t exist. You may well be equal to or better than the person they actually hire. Go ahead and apply! What’s the worst thing that’ll happen? Rejection for a job has a much lower emotional investment than, say, rejection for a date.
What would be the downside? Is there any cost involved? I say go for it.
If applicable, you should be sure to say how your current experience, while perhaps not with the specified tool or skill, will help you gain said tool knowledge or skill quickly.
For example, I’m a technical writer. I applied for a job where they wanted FrameMaker experience. I didn’t have it. So, I talked about my MS Word experience, compared it to what I knew about FrameMaker, and showed how I’d be able to apply my current knowledge to quickly get up to speed in the new tool.
Likewise, say you don’t know Dreamweaver, but have basic HTML skills - you could talk about whatever other HTML editor you used and how it’d be easy for you to switch.
It’s easy to do this with tools, harder to do with skills. But you could probably find something comparable, I’d think. “No, I’ve never directly managed people before, but at my last position I was team lead over X, Y, and Z projects where I coordinated team member’s work activities to ensure delivery by the deadline. I’ve also led efforts to define team roles and responsibilities and improve our service offerings.” That sort of thing.
Good luck!
Also so you can say that while you don’t know X, you do know Y which is almost X. The n+1st language is always easier to learn.
Judging from the CTO interviews in Computerworld, the reason they do this is so that they can have other companies train their employees for them, and don’t have to be bothered waiting for someone to learn that next language or system. To get the job, people just have to be better than everyone else.
The same thing goes for buying EDA tools. I’ve been on both sides of this, and it is common for companies to publish long requirements lists, many of which they don’t need. It used to be common for EDA companies to license some tool just to say they have it.
HR may kick out resumes without all the requirements, but when all the resumes they get are filtered out, they’ll make another pass. If the requirement is important, it will come up in the interview. If it doesn’t, either the hiring managers are incompetent, or, more likely, they don’t care about it.
Exactly.