When there are two lists in a job description named "minimum qualifications" and "preferred qualifications" I think a significant number of people would think _exactly_ that for the "minimum qualifications" list.
Women appear to be much more affected by this which biases job descriptions with ridiculous requirements to men: https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...
Also see the comment by MS employee on the topic of "minimum requirements": https://twitter.com/colinmbrandt/status/1409577979731058699
I’m part of a mentoring group for college grads and junior engineers. It’s common for software engineers to assume that there is a clueless (and/or evil) HR person reading these resumes and executing the requirements listing like computer code. if(education.level < MASTERS) then return E_UNQUALIFIED. Even if John Carmack is applying.
A lot of them get advice from the internet or their parents that tends to be overly cynical and often dated. When we review resumes we often have to remove Microsoft Word and Excel from the qualifications section of programmer resumes because they heard from the internet or a parent that they’ll be rejected by automated HR software without those keyword. I still see people trying to keyword stuff their resumes with 6pt white text at the bottom (don’t do this)
In practice, hiring is hard and successful companies understand that they can’t afford to filter out qualified candidates over arbitrary low-signal missing requirements. I hope nobody really believes that Facebook HR people would reject John Carmack’s resume because it didn’t have a Master’s degree. That’s what Carmack himself is trying to explain. It should also be obvious that Carmack is the definition of an outlier in this scenario.
Why is this a bad idea? I've had my resume auto filtered out in the past and the keywords at the bottom seem to have helped. I don't try to hide it in white-on-white text, though. I have an explicit section (though in a very small font) titled something like "automated scanner keywords"
"And the candidate's name must be Carl because Carl just left, and PMs really got used to calling the Angular person Carl."
I rarely apply to any position where I don't meet the mininum requeriments.
Also I've seen vacancies with huge lists of requeriments, including exotic ones (like being an RPG player) and I meet them all, sent a resume, and didn't got invited to the interview...
So I guess that indeed, the requeriments are bullshit.
I was always believing that list requirements are just a wish list, something that the company would like to have in ideal case, but even they don't expect they will find an actual perfect match.
The more important thing when reading the job requirements is to figure out what is actually a core requirement that is important for the job, and what can be learned later, and just apply.