Companies emphasize the importance of having managers with the fitting and required competences. They point out that it is difficult to recruit such personnel. Many companies try to identify suitable managers by hiring recruitment companies. In our empirical study we investigated, on the one hand, on which competences recruiters focus and, on the other hand, which competences applicants emphasize. The practice-oriented study aimed to gain more knowledge about how recruiters and applicants think and, to point out how better decisions may be taken. In the literature, there is no single definition to the term of competences. Nonetheless, a frequently cited defining element is a person’s abilities, skills and willingness to solve problems in certain situations. In the literature considered in the paper different specific competences are mentioned to be of importance and relevance. However, in our empirical study we didn’t start deductively, but inductively: Instead of theory (that has to be tested) empirical data was used as a starting point. Data was analysed in new ways by using an unsupervised text mining approach combined with qualitative methods (qualitative content analysis). This approach objects to support the gaining of knowledge through text-based business analytics. The results show that applicants and recruiters weigh the importance of the established competence-categories quite differently, although not fundamentally different. However, one large difference was found. It refers to the competence-categories personality and hard qualifications in the context of genders: Recruiters put with 56% a much higher weight on hard qualifications in the case of women then in the case of men where this value is ‘only’ 35%. In the case of men, the recruiters compensate the either low value in hard qualifications through personality with a relatively high value of 33% compared to women with only 13%. Contrastingly, both, male and female applicants themselves weigh the hard qualifications quite similarly with 50% (male) and 46% (female). To validate this and the other results that were found, data of more recruiting companies would be needed. However, the result may be used by recruiters to recognise their unconscious gender-bias and to develop strategies to avoid it.