Why do I get rejected when I meet every requirement?

Often you don't actually meet the hard requirements — and neither you nor the screening software noticed, because both counted the wrong thing. The most common miss: "N years of X" means N years doing X specifically, not N years of total work. Nine years of total experience with zero product-manager titles does not satisfy "5–10 years of product management experience" — but an optimistic reading of your own CV, and a surprising amount of matching software, says it does.

Quantity has a subject

We hit this bug in our own scoring engine. A JD asked for 5–10 years of product management; the extraction step asked only "how many years of total experience?" — got 9 — and awarded the full 35-point experience weight. On the very same screen, the itemized fit matrix correctly showed the candidate had zero PM titles. Total experience is always greater than or equal to specialty experience, so counting quantity without its subject always errs in your favor — right up until a human recruiter reads the actual titles and rejects in six seconds.

Gate requirements are not weighted items

Years-of-experience is typically the first hard filter a recruiter applies, before anything else is read. A scoring system that treats it as one weighted factor among many will let ten strong answers elsewhere "buy back" a failed gate — producing a strong-match headline for a candidate who gets auto-rejected at the first screen. After finding this, we capped our own headline score at 70 whenever the years gate fails, no matter how good everything else looks. Two verdicts on the same screen must be able to veto each other; whenever the optimistic one always wins, the optimistic one is always wrong.

An honest self-check, five minutes

• Rewrite every "N years of X" requirement as two questions: how many years does the JD want, and doing what, specifically?
• Count only roles whose actual title or day-to-day work matches the subject. Adjacent work counts in the interview conversation, not in the gate.
• Do not count education years as work experience — degree date ranges are the single most common way totals get inflated.
• If a requirement says "in trading", "in healthcare", "in B2B SaaS" — that qualifier is part of the subject too.
• If you fail a gate, the fix is targeting, not phrasing: apply where your subject-years genuinely clear the bar, and address the gap honestly in the letter for stretch roles.

What to do next

Before your next batch of applications, run your résumé against each JD with the subject question in mind — manually, or with a tool that parses requirements into quantity and subject separately. OfferCoach does exactly that split (and caps its own score when a gate fails), which is worth knowing mainly because most matchers don't: any tool showing you a high match on a role where you lack the titled years is optimizing your hope, not your outcome.