A week or two after I submitted my resume in response to a posting on Monster, I received a call from an administrator (not HR) asking if I’d be interested in coming in for testing. Due to vacations, holidays, etc., it took a couple of weeks to get testing scheduled. Testing consists of a reading comprehension test, which, if not passed, excludes you from consideration. Passing, which I did, moves you on to the rest of the tests: Excel, Word, Adobe Acrobat, proofreading, document markup, and maybe one or two others, all of which combined took about 4 hours but were relatively simple. About two weeks later, the administrator contacted me to schedule an interview. I was to meet with the hiring manager, the department head, and two other managers in the department. When I arrived, I was told the department head was not in but I did meet with the hiring manager, which seemed to go really well. She told me she definitely wanted to have me back to meet the head of the department. The rest of the interviews went fine and it turned out that one of the other managers I met with had a similar industry background to mine (this is relevant later on). The next day I received a call from the administrator asking if I could come back to meet with the head of the department. No problem. I came back the following day to meet with her. At one point, as she was scanning through my resume, she said to me “you seem to have everything we are looking for.” She even had me meet with another manager in the department who I was not scheduled to meet that day. A couple of weeks later I received a letter via snail mail basically saying that they had not found a candidate who had met all of their requirements. They were still looking but I was no longer being considered. It was the strangest thing. I was told I had everything they were looking for during the interview, yet this letter says nobody had met their requirements and I was not being considered even though they hadn’t found a better candidate. I emailed the hiring manager and department head asking for clarification so I could understand where I fell short. No response. About a month later, I saw the position posted on Monster again. So I emailed the hiring manager and department head asking if the position was still open and, if so, if I could make another case for my candidacy. I finally received a response from the hiring manager who said that I met all their requirements except for one: my background was not in educational publishing; my background was in financial publishing (similar to one of the manager’s I met with). If an educational publishing background was the driving determinant for my not being considered, why waste my time in the first place? They knew my background wasn’t in educational publishing before they even contacted me. I made 3 trips to the company and spent about 7-8 hours there between tests and interviews when I seemingly didn’t really have a shot to begin with.