Years of experience requirements are the most widely used and least meaningful filter in hiring. Every job seeker knows this intuitively — "just apply anyway" is the standard advice on every career subreddit. But nobody has actually looked at the data to understand what these numbers mean in practice.

We did. Here's what 109,875 startup job postings tell us about experience requirements.

The distribution is more extreme than you'd expect

The single most common YOE requirement across all startup jobs is "5+ years" — it appears in 30,890 postings, or 28% of the total. That's not a bell curve. That's a spike.

After that: 3+ years (9,072 postings), 2+ years (7,091), 8+ years (6,942), 10+ years (6,454), 7+ years (5,158). The entry-level bucket — 0-2 years — accounts for just 4,747 postings, or 4.3% of all jobs.

Let that sink in. Fewer than 5% of startup job postings explicitly welcome candidates with less than two years of experience. Meanwhile, nearly 17,000 postings require 8+ years — which means they're looking for someone who started working before the iPhone existed.

But here's the thing: 18,580 postings — 17% of the total — list no experience requirement at all. These "unknown" postings aren't entry-level by default. Many are senior roles where the company decided that listing a number was pointless. Others are roles where the hiring manager genuinely doesn't care about years and wants to evaluate skills directly.

What the numbers actually signal

After talking to dozens of hiring managers at startups, I've learned that YOE requirements serve three completely different purposes depending on who wrote the job posting:

The HR-wrote-it signal. When a job posting says "5+ years of experience in Python," it usually means someone in HR or recruiting used a template. The hiring manager probably said "I want someone who's built production systems" and the recruiter translated that into a number. These requirements are the most flexible — apply with 3 years and strong projects and you'll get through.

The leveling signal. At companies with structured compensation bands, YOE is a proxy for level. "5+ years" means "we budgeted this role at the senior level." This isn't about your actual experience — it's about where you'll land on the pay scale. If you have 3 years but can demonstrate senior-level work, you might get the role but at a lower level (and lower comp). If you have 8 years, you might get the role but they'll try to up-level you to staff.

The genuine filter. Some roles — especially in regulated industries, security, and infrastructure — actually need deep experience. When a fintech startup asks for "8+ years in distributed systems," they mean it. They need someone who has seen systems fail in production and knows how to prevent it. These are the postings where applying with half the experience genuinely won't work.

The 70% rule

Here's the framework I use and recommend: if you meet 70% of the stated requirements, apply. Not 50% — that's too aggressive and will waste your time. Not 90% — that's too conservative and you'll miss opportunities you're qualified for.

The 70% rule works because of how job postings are constructed. Most postings list 8-12 requirements. Of those, 3-4 are genuinely essential (the hiring manager would reject a candidate who lacked them), 3-4 are strongly preferred (the hiring manager would compromise on these for the right candidate), and 2-4 are aspirational (nice-to-haves that the hiring manager added because "why not").

If you meet 70% of the requirements, you almost certainly meet all the essential ones and most of the preferred ones. That makes you a viable candidate.

The exception is when the posting explicitly says "minimum" or "must have" next to a requirement. Startups that take the time to distinguish between required and preferred qualifications are usually being honest about the distinction.

When to ignore YOE entirely

There are three situations where experience requirements are essentially meaningless:

When the company is pre-Series A. Early-stage startups can't afford to be picky. They need people who can do the work, regardless of how many years they've been doing it. A 2-year engineer who ships fast is more valuable than a 10-year engineer who needs three months to ramp up. If the posting says "5+ years" but the company has 12 employees and $3M in funding, apply with whatever you've got.

When the role involves emerging technology. Nobody has 5 years of experience with LLMs. Nobody has 8 years of experience with Rust in production. When the required technology is newer than the required experience, the number is fiction. Apply based on your ability to learn and adapt.

When you have a referral. A warm introduction bypasses the resume screen entirely. The hiring manager will evaluate you on your conversation, not on whether your resume says 5 years or 3 years. This is the single most effective way to overcome a YOE gap.

The real question to ask yourself

Instead of "Do I have enough years?", ask: "Can I do this job on day one?"

Not "Can I do every part of this job perfectly?" — nobody can, even with 20 years of experience. But "Can I contribute meaningfully within the first two weeks? Can I understand the codebase, participate in design discussions, and ship something small?"

If the answer is yes, apply. The years are a proxy for capability, and proxies are always imperfect. The 30,890 postings asking for "5+ years" aren't all looking for the same thing. Some want deep expertise. Some want a level. And some just copied a template.

Your job as a candidate isn't to match every number on the posting. It's to demonstrate that you can do the work. Everything else is negotiable.