Should You Hire Someone Who Meets 70% of the Job Requirements?

A candidate meets seven out of ten requirements on your job description. Another meets all ten. Who is actually the stronger hire?

It can be tempting to choose the closest match on paper, but recruitment rarely works that neatly. Some requirements are essential, some can be learned and others probably did not need to be on the job description in the first place.

So, should you hire someone who meets 70% of the job requirements? In many cases, yes. The percentage matters far less than which 30% they are missing.

Is 70% of the Job Requirements Enough?

There is no established recruitment rule stating that a candidate needs to meet 70% of a job description.

Treating requirements as a percentage can actually make hiring decisions more difficult because it assumes every requirement carries equal weight.

Imagine two candidates both meet seven out of ten requirements.

One is missing experience with an internal system, knowledge of your particular industry and one desirable technology. The other lacks a technical skill they would use every day, management experience and an essential qualification.

Both are technically a 70% match, but they represent very different hiring decisions.

Rather than focusing on the percentage, employers should consider which requirements somebody needs from day one and which could realistically be developed.

Not All Job Requirements Are Equal

Before advertising a vacancy, it helps to separate requirements into three categories:

• skills somebody genuinely needs from day one
• experience that would be useful but is not essential
• skills that can realistically be learned after joining

This sounds simple, but job descriptions have a habit of becoming wish lists.

A hiring manager adds the core requirements. Another stakeholder requests industry experience. The previous employee had a particular qualification, so that gets added. Familiarity with another platform becomes desirable and eventually desirable becomes essential.

The result can be a specification describing an ideal candidate rather than the person actually needed to perform the role.

CIPD recommends keeping selection criteria to as few as possible and ensuring requirements are genuinely necessary for the position.

Being more disciplined at this stage can significantly increase the number of relevant candidates without lowering hiring standards.

Skills-Based Hiring Is Becoming More Common

More employers are reconsidering how much weight they give to traditional hiring criteria.

LinkedIn’s recruitment research found that 93% of talent acquisition professionals believe accurately assessing a candidate’s skills is crucial for improving quality of hire. Companies making the greatest use of skills-based searches were also 12% more likely to make a quality hire.

This does not mean qualifications, experience or previous job titles have no value.

They provide useful context, but they should not automatically outweigh evidence that somebody has the skills and potential to perform the role.

For many positions, focusing more closely on what somebody can actually do can also open the search to candidates who might have been overlooked because their previous job title, industry or career path does not perfectly match the specification.

Look at How Difficult the Missing 30% Is to Learn

The most useful way to assess a candidate who does not meet every requirement is to consider how difficult the gaps would be to close.

Learning a new project management platform or becoming familiar with an internal system could take a matter of weeks.

Developing years of leadership experience or learning the technical foundations of a highly specialised position is very different.

This is particularly relevant in technology recruitment, where requiring experience with an exact combination of tools can unnecessarily reduce the candidate pool.

A Software Engineer who understands the underlying technology and has repeatedly learned new frameworks may be a stronger long-term hire than somebody who happens to have used your exact technology stack before.

The size of the development gap matters more than the number of requirements missing.

Do Not Overlook Transferable Skills

Exact industry experience is another requirement worth questioning.

Hiring someone from a direct competitor can reduce the amount they need to learn, but requiring identical industry experience can dramatically shrink your available talent pool.

Someone moving between sectors may still bring the technical ability, stakeholder management, commercial understanding or problem-solving skills required to succeed.

They can also bring experience your existing team does not have.

This becomes particularly important when recruiting for specialist skills. Combining a niche technical requirement with a specific industry background, exact job title and fixed number of years’ experience can make an already difficult search unnecessarily restrictive.

Hiring for Potential Still Requires Support

There are positions where hiring somebody with development areas makes complete sense.

Junior and mid-level professionals will naturally have more to learn, and a candidate with strong underlying ability may quickly close smaller skills gaps.

Senior and highly specialised positions can be different. If someone needs to lead a transformation programme immediately or solve a complex technical problem independently, previous experience may genuinely be essential.

Employers also need to consider what happens after the person is hired.

Recruiting somebody based on their potential and then providing no training, onboarding or support puts both the employee and employer in a difficult position.

A 70% candidate can become an excellent hire, but the business needs to be realistic about its ability to develop the remaining 30%.

A 100% Match Is Not Automatically the Best Hire

There is another side to the conversation.

The candidate who matches every line of your job description may not automatically be the person most likely to succeed or stay.

CIPD research published in 2026 found that 45% of UK employees feel their skills are under-utilised at work.

If someone has already performed almost exactly the same role, using the same technology at the same level within the same industry, consider what your opportunity gives them that they do not already have.

That could be greater responsibility, progression, more interesting projects or exposure to a different environment.

Someone who has room to develop may see considerably more long-term opportunity in the position than a candidate for whom the job represents a sideways move.

Assess Ability Rather Than Counting Requirements

Being more flexible about job requirements should not mean lowering your hiring standards.

It should mean assessing candidates against the things that actually matter.

Practical assessments, work samples, structured interviews and discussions around previous projects can give employers much stronger evidence than simply comparing a CV against a checklist.

This becomes particularly useful when comparing a candidate who has the exact experience with somebody who has strong transferable skills but needs some development.

The question should ultimately be whether the person can succeed in the role, not whether their CV mirrors the job description.

When Should You Hire Someone Who Meets 70% of the Requirements?

A candidate who meets around 70% of your requirements could be a strong hire when they meet the genuinely essential criteria, have relevant transferable skills and can realistically develop the areas they are missing.

There will still be positions where closer alignment is necessary, particularly regulated, highly specialised or senior roles where someone needs to operate independently immediately.

The aim is not to lower the hiring standard to 70%.

It is to make sure you are measuring candidates against the right standard in the first place.

Stop Hiring Against a Percentage

A job description should help you find someone who can succeed in the position. It should not become a ten-point checklist where every requirement carries the same weight.

A candidate who meets 70% of the requirements but excels in the capabilities that matter could be a much stronger hire than somebody who technically meets 100%.

Before rejecting someone for missing part of the specification, look at what is actually missing and how difficult it would be to develop.

And if you repeatedly struggle to find candidates who meet every requirement, it may be worth reviewing the job description before assuming there is a shortage of suitable people.