You have a posting open and you meet most of it. The question is whether most is enough. The usual answer is "it depends", which is true and useless. This page gives the rule AppliAid applies to every posting, so you can apply it yourself, and then applies it for you if you want.
A posting is usually written by more than one person: a hiring manager describing the person they would most like, and whoever adds what similar postings say and what the job must formally require. The result lists more than the job needs. Two people with the same CV read that list differently: one sees the three lines they miss and closes the tab, the other sees the seven they meet and applies.
In a 2014 Harvard Business Review piece, Tara Sophia Mohr asked people why they had not applied for a job they wanted. The commonest answer was that they did not think they would be hired because they did not meet the qualifications. The list did that on its own. It was not written as a filter, and it gets read as one.
Every line in a posting is one of three things, and only one of the three decides whether to apply.
So the first thing to do with a posting is to sort it. Count the must-haves. Ignore the rest for now. AppliAid weights a must-have at three, a responsibility at one and a half, and a nice-to-have at one, which is the same sorting done in arithmetic; the weights are on How scoring works.
This is the part the advice columns skip, so here it is as a rule.
Those are the two caps in AppliAid's method, written as advice. A single missing must-have takes a strong verdict down to moderate. Three missing must-haves, or gaps in more than a third of them, take a strong or a moderate down to stretch. An average would hide this; the caps exist so it cannot be hidden.
Most requirements you "don't meet" you partly meet. The posting asks for five years in a technique and you have three. It asks for experience from concept through launch and you have concept through validation. It asks for a named instrument and you have run its predecessor. None of these is a gap. Each is partial evidence, and the right move is to write it as exactly that: what you have, in the posting's own terms, with the missing piece named rather than implied.
The wrong move is to round it up. A reader who finds one rounded-up line stops trusting the others. AppliAid marks a requirement partial when the evidence covers part of it and writes the missing part into the reasoning, and when it drafts a resume from that record the partial stays partial: every bullet names the record it came from, and a bullet with no record behind it is rejected in code. That is what a verdict you can argue with looks like.
Two cases. The first is the cap above: three or more must-haves missing, or more than a third of them. Applying anyway costs you two hours and costs the reader thirty seconds, and it teaches you nothing, because a silence does not say which line ended it.
The second is the shape of the gaps. When the requirements you do not meet are mostly partial, the fit is one to reframe: the evidence exists and the document has to say it in the posting's words. When the gaps outnumber the partials, the fit is one to develop: the evidence does not exist yet, and no document can supply it. AppliAid returns exactly those four words as recommendations, apply, reframe, develop and skip, and a poor fit gets skip, in writing, so the two hours go to a posting that can return them.
The rule is easy to state and slow to apply by hand, because sorting twenty lines and finding the evidence for each one in your own history is an hour's work per posting. AppliAid does it in a few minutes: it reads your CV once into records, splits the posting into requirements, judges each one met, partial or gap with the reasoning shown, and returns the score and the recommendation. The first fit is free, no card, and the CV file is deleted after it is read.