How adverts count experience
Two adverts can ask for the same phrase and mean two different things by it. Read the wrong one and you end up proving the wrong bar.
“5+ years' experience” still shows up in most adverts, and it almost never means what it says on its own. Underneath the phrase, an employer is usually asking one of two different questions:
Has this person done the job long enough to be trusted with it alone? Five years reads as depth: the same problem, handled longer and better each time, with fewer things left to learn the hard way.
Has this person seen enough different versions of the problem to have a pattern for it? Five years reads as breadth: different teams, different failures, different constraints, so the sixth version of the problem doesn't surprise them.
Both are real, defensible things to screen for. They are not the same thing, and most adverts never say which one they mean. You have to read for it.
Reading as depth
The sentence around the number talks about ownership, autonomy, or being the only person on something: “will own the process end to end,” “minimal oversight,” “the senior point of contact for.”
What shows it: one role held for most or all of the stretch, ideally with a promotion or an expanding scope inside it. A CV with five different one-year stints answers the wrong question here, however busy those years were.
Reading as breadth
The sentence around the number talks about range, or the size and shape of what you have worked on changing: “across a variety of,” “in fast-changing environments,” “from small teams to scale.”
What shows it: the spread. A different team size, a different kind of constraint, a role that didn't look like the one before it. One long unbroken stretch in a single shape of job answers the wrong question here.
Upload it alongside an advert and Friday tells you, requirement by requirement, whether it's proving depth, breadth, or neither.
Check your CVFive years demonstrates nothing on its own. What it's supposed to show is buried in the sentence around it.
Most advice about “matching the years on the advert” stops at the number, because the number is the easy part to check. It is also the part that tells you the least. The same five years, described two different ways, answers two different employers. A CV written to satisfy the number rather than the question underneath it reads as thin to both.
This is also why the same CV can't answer every advert that asks for “5+ years.” One wants your longest role foregrounded. The other wants your most varied ones. Tailoring is deciding, per advert, which true thing about your five years answers what is being asked.
Further down the ladder the same number does something else again: an entry-level advert asking for years of experience is usually mixing a wishlist with a real bar.
Upload the advert alongside your CV and Friday tells you, requirement by requirement, what your five years actually show against this posting.
Friday is a career evidence engine for people who have done the work and cannot get the page to show it.
It is early and there are rough edges. What people report is what gets fixed first.
Paste as many adverts as you like, and one CV is composed for you to keep. The record stays yours whether or not you ever pay.