One of my former bosses said she literally fished my cover letter and resume out of the trash. Frustrated that HR wasn’t sending her the right people for a writing job, she demanded that they turn over the submissions that they had already discarded.
The problem wasn’t that HR was sending her unqualified candidates; it was that those qualifications included a very specific skill: experience writing about computers, which I didn’t have. My former boss was flooded with letters from technical....