We found AstraZenica, but I think they were taking on rather small numbers. We went to an event they put on and it was pretty clear that without lab experience alongside excellent A levels you hadn't a hope. We looked for opportunities for that but there are no labs he could get to anywhere near us.
You needed an uncle who owned a chemistry research lab, basically.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
That there is the curse of employment in modern Britain.
All the employers with semi-skilled or generic skill jobs think the well qualified people will easily get a specialist job and won't take them on.
All the more specialist employers will actually only touch you if your experience and skill set exactly matches what they think you need.
There's a lot of lip-service give to the concept of transferable skills but in reality you always lose out to the person who has the specific skill they want.
It may be different in management - I have a relative who's managed to get jobs she didn't even meet the "required" criteria for, but in technical fields you absolutely need all the "required" and the "desirable" to be in with a chance.
Which leaves me fucked, not least because doing management would have me on the roof with a weapon in seconds flat.
The UK government expects that the large majority of "Plan 2" loans will not be repaid.
Plan 2 is a somewhat odd loan, in that it accrues interest at a rate that depends on your income (RPI for incomes under £28,470 pa, rising to RPI + 3% for incomes over £51,245 pa). You repay 9% of your income over £28,470 pa.
Average students graduate with £53K of debt. Anyone with that much debt needs to earn about £65K pa to reduce their loan balance, otherwise they're just paying an additional 9% tax on income over £28,470 for 30 years.
Student loan debt doesn't really count as "debt" from the point of view of people computing your credit-worthiness, and the debt evaporates if you die: your estate doesn't have to pay it.
It's more like a slightly odd-shaped graduate tax that is capped for the rich than it is a real loan.
The new loan (Plan 5) doesn't have the income-dependent interest rate, so our student with £53K of debt will start reducing their balance if they earn more than around £44K pa, but they have to wait 40 years before their loan is cancelled.
For comparison, a newly-qualified nurse or teacher earns around £32K pa.
No it is not a graduate tax. For one thing not all graduates pay it. For another it is a literal debt against your name individually.
This matters because future governments can change the game adversely impacting on you directly. They can do this by freezing the repayment thresholds, so the point where you start paying is forced downwards as inflation increases wages. They can also increase interest rates, the length of the repayment terms. All many years after the loan was taken.
It is also not 'just' an additional percentage over a floor, which is rapidly approaching minimum wage. It is an additional marginal rate for low wage earners.
In brief it is a scam cooked up to push financial responsibility for the university sector off the government books and to load it onto individual people who lacked knowledge at 17 as to what it was that they were doing and encouraged by media personalities who lacked imagination as to what future governments might do when presented with billions of £ of personalised debt ripe to be exploited.
The crazy part about this whole situation is that it does not even pay adequately for the undergraduate university education it is supposed to fund leaving tens of British universities close to bankruptcy.
Anyone who thinks that the debts of graduates will not be mercilessly ravaged many times more in the future in a futile effort to buttress funding failures has not been paying attention.
We found AstraZenica, but I think they were taking on rather small numbers. We went to an event they put on and it was pretty clear that without lab experience alongside excellent A levels you hadn't a hope. We looked for opportunities for that but there are no labs he could get to anywhere near us.
You needed an uncle who owned a chemistry research lab, basically.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
That there is the curse of employment in modern Britain.
All the employers with semi-skilled or generic skill jobs think the well qualified people will easily get a specialist job and won't take them on.
All the more specialist employers will actually only touch you if your experience and skill set exactly matches what they think you need.
There's a lot of lip-service give to the concept of transferable skills but in reality you always lose out to the person who has the specific skill they want.
It may be different in management - I have a relative who's managed to get jobs she didn't even meet the "required" criteria for, but in technical fields you absolutely need all the "required" and the "desirable" to be in with a chance.
I would contrast this with knowledge of someone I know who works in a government admin role.
I am not saying all roles are like this but I suspect many actually are.
As is well-known in many government jobs, promotion within your team is near impossible. So people regularly move within teams, within departments or even between governments. I know someone else who has had a career spent between the Office of National Statistics, the business department (I forget the acronym) and the Welsh government in very similar roles.
The job this person I am describing applied for was very specific with a very specific title and specific roles. However they were actually looking for a generalist, someone who would work well in a team who could learn quickly what needed to be done and get on with it. In a few years this person might be doing something with a completely different title and different responsibilities in a different team. So the application process is essentially about gatekeeping.
The conclusion is that one of the most important things a young graduate can do to get one of these types of roles is the "good guy" test. Which means being able to show the future employer not that you are the perfect fit for this particular role but that you fit the ethos of the organisation, that you will fit in and that you will do what needs to be done without causing everyone a headache.
Which is not to say that there are not roles which demand very specific skills, but I think a surprising number are really looking for generalists who others can work with.
We found AstraZenica, but I think they were taking on rather small numbers. We went to an event they put on and it was pretty clear that without lab experience alongside excellent A levels you hadn't a hope. We looked for opportunities for that but there are no labs he could get to anywhere near us.
You needed an uncle who owned a chemistry research lab, basically.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
That there is the curse of employment in modern Britain.
All the employers with semi-skilled or generic skill jobs think the well qualified people will easily get a specialist job and won't take them on.
All the more specialist employers will actually only touch you if your experience and skill set exactly matches what they think you need.
There's a lot of lip-service give to the concept of transferable skills but in reality you always lose out to the person who has the specific skill they want.
It may be different in management - I have a relative who's managed to get jobs she didn't even meet the "required" criteria for, but in technical fields you absolutely need all the "required" and the "desirable" to be in with a chance.
I would contrast this with knowledge of someone I know who works in a government admin role.
I am not saying all roles are like this but I suspect many actually are.
As is well-known in many government jobs, promotion within your team is near impossible. So people regularly move within teams, within departments or even between governments. I know someone else who has had a career spent between the Office of National Statistics, the business department (I forget the acronym) and the Welsh government in very similar roles.
The job this person I am describing applied for was very specific with a very specific title and specific roles. However they were actually looking for a generalist, someone who would work well in a team who could learn quickly what needed to be done and get on with it. In a few years this person might be doing something with a completely different title and different responsibilities in a different team. So the application process is essentially about gatekeeping.
The conclusion is that one of the most important things a young graduate can do to get one of these types of roles is the "good guy" test. Which means being able to show the future employer not that you are the perfect fit for this particular role but that you fit the ethos of the organisation, that you will fit in and that you will do what needs to be done without causing everyone a headache.
Which is not to say that there are not roles which demand very specific skills, but I think a surprising number are really looking for generalists who others can work with.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
We found AstraZenica, but I think they were taking on rather small numbers. We went to an event they put on and it was pretty clear that without lab experience alongside excellent A levels you hadn't a hope. We looked for opportunities for that but there are no labs he could get to anywhere near us.
You needed an uncle who owned a chemistry research lab, basically.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
That there is the curse of employment in modern Britain.
All the employers with semi-skilled or generic skill jobs think the well qualified people will easily get a specialist job and won't take them on.
All the more specialist employers will actually only touch you if your experience and skill set exactly matches what they think you need.
There's a lot of lip-service give to the concept of transferable skills but in reality you always lose out to the person who has the specific skill they want.
It may be different in management - I have a relative who's managed to get jobs she didn't even meet the "required" criteria for, but in technical fields you absolutely need all the "required" and the "desirable" to be in with a chance.
I would contrast this with knowledge of someone I know who works in a government admin role.
I am not saying all roles are like this but I suspect many actually are.
As is well-known in many government jobs, promotion within your team is near impossible. So people regularly move within teams, within departments or even between governments. I know someone else who has had a career spent between the Office of National Statistics, the business department (I forget the acronym) and the Welsh government in very similar roles.
The job this person I am describing applied for was very specific with a very specific title and specific roles. However they were actually looking for a generalist, someone who would work well in a team who could learn quickly what needed to be done and get on with it. In a few years this person might be doing something with a completely different title and different responsibilities in a different team. So the application process is essentially about gatekeeping.
The conclusion is that one of the most important things a young graduate can do to get one of these types of roles is the "good guy" test. Which means being able to show the future employer not that you are the perfect fit for this particular role but that you fit the ethos of the organisation, that you will fit in and that you will do what needs to be done without causing everyone a headache.
Which is not to say that there are not roles which demand very specific skills, but I think a surprising number are really looking for generalists who others can work with.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
There's a truism that candidates can seek to be the most attractive, best qualified or nicest.
Attractiveness can take many forms (most intelligent person in the room, most interesting, most varied CV). Best qualified is usually about credentials.
Most candidates for most graduate jobs are trying to distinguish themselves from everyone else on one or other of these and mostly fail almost by definition. You might be proud of your Computer Science degree but you are competing with the people with a Masters degree and and internships at Google and Microsoft.
Being a nice person to work with is something you can prove. You can work on changing your character.
Not every employer recognises it, but I believe many do.
I cannot say anything about fibre-optic cable laying.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
Too bloody true.
Believe you me, if a generalist who got the job done and got on with people was what people were really looking for I'd never have been out of work.
@Basketactortale I am living this right now and what you are saying is utter, utter crap.
Originally posted by Gramps49: So, student debt is not just a US problem?
Scottish students don't pay tuition fees. My two both graduated with a manageable £9,000 debt each from their student loans. My son-in-law is English and has massively more student debt than my daughter, although they both went to the same University.
It's one of the reasons that my husband and I are very happy to pay more income tax than we would if we were in England; I think we pay less than £1000 pa more than if we had the same income but lived in England, so we feel as though we have made a net gain.
The down side is that Scottish universities helped balance the books with overseas students paying full fees. My husband made several trips to India specifically to try to attract overseas students to come to Scotland. The clamp-down on visas has made Scotland less attractive and is badly affecting Scottish universities. Westminster has taken away the mechanism which helped Scottish students avoid massive student debt.
We found AstraZenica, but I think they were taking on rather small numbers. We went to an event they put on and it was pretty clear that without lab experience alongside excellent A levels you hadn't a hope. We looked for opportunities for that but there are no labs he could get to anywhere near us.
You needed an uncle who owned a chemistry research lab, basically.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
That there is the curse of employment in modern Britain.
All the employers with semi-skilled or generic skill jobs think the well qualified people will easily get a specialist job and won't take them on.
All the more specialist employers will actually only touch you if your experience and skill set exactly matches what they think you need.
There's a lot of lip-service give to the concept of transferable skills but in reality you always lose out to the person who has the specific skill they want.
It may be different in management - I have a relative who's managed to get jobs she didn't even meet the "required" criteria for, but in technical fields you absolutely need all the "required" and the "desirable" to be in with a chance.
I would contrast this with knowledge of someone I know who works in a government admin role.
I am not saying all roles are like this but I suspect many actually are.
As is well-known in many government jobs, promotion within your team is near impossible. So people regularly move within teams, within departments or even between governments. I know someone else who has had a career spent between the Office of National Statistics, the business department (I forget the acronym) and the Welsh government in very similar roles.
The job this person I am describing applied for was very specific with a very specific title and specific roles. However they were actually looking for a generalist, someone who would work well in a team who could learn quickly what needed to be done and get on with it. In a few years this person might be doing something with a completely different title and different responsibilities in a different team. So the application process is essentially about gatekeeping.
The conclusion is that one of the most important things a young graduate can do to get one of these types of roles is the "good guy" test. Which means being able to show the future employer not that you are the perfect fit for this particular role but that you fit the ethos of the organisation, that you will fit in and that you will do what needs to be done without causing everyone a headache.
Which is not to say that there are not roles which demand very specific skills, but I think a surprising number are really looking for generalists who others can work with.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
There's a truism that candidates can seek to be the most attractive, best qualified or nicest.
Attractiveness can take many forms (most intelligent person in the room, most interesting, most varied CV). Best qualified is usually about credentials.
Most candidates for most graduate jobs are trying to distinguish themselves from everyone else on one or other of these and mostly fail almost by definition. You might be proud of your Computer Science degree but you are competing with the people with a Masters degree and and internships at Google and Microsoft.
Being a nice person to work with is something you can prove. You can work on changing your character.
Not every employer recognises it, but I believe many do.
I cannot say anything about fibre-optic cable laying.
You do not get as far as interview to prove what an affable fellow you are if you don't meet the technical requirements. That's the non-negotiable and in an employers' market they can afford to be very precise about it.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
Too bloody true.
Believe you me, if a generalist who got the job done and got on with people was what people were really looking for I'd never have been out of work.
@Basketactortale I am living this right now and what you are saying is utter, utter crap.
Ok. I'm sorry if you are struggling, I assure you it is not crap.
We found AstraZenica, but I think they were taking on rather small numbers. We went to an event they put on and it was pretty clear that without lab experience alongside excellent A levels you hadn't a hope. We looked for opportunities for that but there are no labs he could get to anywhere near us.
You needed an uncle who owned a chemistry research lab, basically.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
That there is the curse of employment in modern Britain.
All the employers with semi-skilled or generic skill jobs think the well qualified people will easily get a specialist job and won't take them on.
All the more specialist employers will actually only touch you if your experience and skill set exactly matches what they think you need.
There's a lot of lip-service give to the concept of transferable skills but in reality you always lose out to the person who has the specific skill they want.
It may be different in management - I have a relative who's managed to get jobs she didn't even meet the "required" criteria for, but in technical fields you absolutely need all the "required" and the "desirable" to be in with a chance.
I would contrast this with knowledge of someone I know who works in a government admin role.
I am not saying all roles are like this but I suspect many actually are.
As is well-known in many government jobs, promotion within your team is near impossible. So people regularly move within teams, within departments or even between governments. I know someone else who has had a career spent between the Office of National Statistics, the business department (I forget the acronym) and the Welsh government in very similar roles.
The job this person I am describing applied for was very specific with a very specific title and specific roles. However they were actually looking for a generalist, someone who would work well in a team who could learn quickly what needed to be done and get on with it. In a few years this person might be doing something with a completely different title and different responsibilities in a different team. So the application process is essentially about gatekeeping.
The conclusion is that one of the most important things a young graduate can do to get one of these types of roles is the "good guy" test. Which means being able to show the future employer not that you are the perfect fit for this particular role but that you fit the ethos of the organisation, that you will fit in and that you will do what needs to be done without causing everyone a headache.
Which is not to say that there are not roles which demand very specific skills, but I think a surprising number are really looking for generalists who others can work with.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
There's a truism that candidates can seek to be the most attractive, best qualified or nicest.
Attractiveness can take many forms (most intelligent person in the room, most interesting, most varied CV). Best qualified is usually about credentials.
Most candidates for most graduate jobs are trying to distinguish themselves from everyone else on one or other of these and mostly fail almost by definition. You might be proud of your Computer Science degree but you are competing with the people with a Masters degree and and internships at Google and Microsoft.
Being a nice person to work with is something you can prove. You can work on changing your character.
Not every employer recognises it, but I believe many do.
I cannot say anything about fibre-optic cable laying.
You do not get as far as interview to prove what an affable fellow you are if you don't meet the technical requirements. That's the non-negotiable and in an employers' market they can afford to be very precise about it.
I've explained the context of the thing I'm talking about and I have also said it does not apply to all employers.
I believe it applies to many but in no sense all graduate jobs.
You mean it only applies when it applies and doesn't when it doesn't?
Yeah, that's obviously and pointlessly true. It's no bloody use at all in STEM where it absolutely doesn't apply.
Well that's not true either, I know someone who got a job in a biochemistry lab recently based on their voluntary work experience over all the other candidates who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
But fine, if you don't want to believe it because you already know everything there is to know about graduate jobs across the massive variety of sciences and engineering, you carry on.
Ok. I'm sorry if you are struggling, I assure you it is not crap.
I've been trying to find a job since July 2024. I've heard some crappy statements in my time, but that takes the fucking biscuit.
IT IS UTTER FUCKING CRAP!!!!!!!
Read for comprehension and if you insist on continuing to feed such patronising bullshit to people who are having to live this shit then I'll see you in Hell.
Ok. I'm sorry if you are struggling, I assure you it is not crap.
I've been trying to find a job since July 2024. I've heard some crappy statements in my time, but that takes the fucking biscuit.
IT IS UTTER FUCKING CRAP!!!!!!!
Read for comprehension and if you insist on continuing to feed such patronising bullshit people who are having to live this shit then I'll see you in Hell.
I know it isn't your experience which I genuinely am sorry to hear. But it is not crap. Simply saying that someone else's knowledge and experience is crap is not a discussion.
You mean it only applies when it applies and doesn't when it doesn't?
Yeah, that's obviously and pointlessly true. It's no bloody use at all in STEM where it absolutely doesn't apply.
Well that's not true either, I know someone who got a job in a biochemistry lab recently based on their voluntary work experience over all the other candidates who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
But fine, if you don't want to believe it because you already know everything there is to know about graduate jobs across the massive variety of sciences and engineering, you carry on.
The point here is this bit: who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
Our point is that you can't, in STEM, make up for being less precisely qualified than another candidate by being affable or anything else. The technical closer fit candidate will get it. And those technical fits are very precisely defined.
You mean it only applies when it applies and doesn't when it doesn't?
Yeah, that's obviously and pointlessly true. It's no bloody use at all in STEM where it absolutely doesn't apply.
Well that's not true either, I know someone who got a job in a biochemistry lab recently based on their voluntary work experience over all the other candidates who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
But fine, if you don't want to believe it because you already know everything there is to know about graduate jobs across the massive variety of sciences and engineering, you carry on.
The point here is this bit: who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
Our point is that you can't, in STEM, make up for being less precisely qualified than another candidate by being affable or anything else. The technical closer fit candidate will get it. And those technical fits are very precisely defined.
How do you know this? If a job is advertised as needing a degree, there is no guarantee that a person with a doctorate will get it. For lots of good reasons. For example there is a very great fear that the candidate will quickly leave for a better opportunity.
I can think of several situations where people with doctorates did not actually get jobs which went to people with degrees.
I have sat on interview panels and there's a scoring system. So it has been determined that the essential characteristics of the candidate are weighed in one way and the desirables in another.
A doctorate, for example, if it is neither a desirable or an essential might be scored but might be weighted differently to other parts of the application. That's entirely normal.
A lot depends on the type of employer, I suspect. Larger and public organisations, with more than half an eye on the Equalities Act, tend to be very careful and rely on fairly mechanistic processes - meet the essential job criteria to get the interview; score the most points at interview to get the job. Everyone gets the same questions.
Comments
Which leaves me fucked, not least because doing management would have me on the roof with a weapon in seconds flat.
No it is not a graduate tax. For one thing not all graduates pay it. For another it is a literal debt against your name individually.
This matters because future governments can change the game adversely impacting on you directly. They can do this by freezing the repayment thresholds, so the point where you start paying is forced downwards as inflation increases wages. They can also increase interest rates, the length of the repayment terms. All many years after the loan was taken.
It is also not 'just' an additional percentage over a floor, which is rapidly approaching minimum wage. It is an additional marginal rate for low wage earners.
In brief it is a scam cooked up to push financial responsibility for the university sector off the government books and to load it onto individual people who lacked knowledge at 17 as to what it was that they were doing and encouraged by media personalities who lacked imagination as to what future governments might do when presented with billions of £ of personalised debt ripe to be exploited.
The crazy part about this whole situation is that it does not even pay adequately for the undergraduate university education it is supposed to fund leaving tens of British universities close to bankruptcy.
Anyone who thinks that the debts of graduates will not be mercilessly ravaged many times more in the future in a futile effort to buttress funding failures has not been paying attention.
I would contrast this with knowledge of someone I know who works in a government admin role.
I am not saying all roles are like this but I suspect many actually are.
As is well-known in many government jobs, promotion within your team is near impossible. So people regularly move within teams, within departments or even between governments. I know someone else who has had a career spent between the Office of National Statistics, the business department (I forget the acronym) and the Welsh government in very similar roles.
The job this person I am describing applied for was very specific with a very specific title and specific roles. However they were actually looking for a generalist, someone who would work well in a team who could learn quickly what needed to be done and get on with it. In a few years this person might be doing something with a completely different title and different responsibilities in a different team. So the application process is essentially about gatekeeping.
The conclusion is that one of the most important things a young graduate can do to get one of these types of roles is the "good guy" test. Which means being able to show the future employer not that you are the perfect fit for this particular role but that you fit the ethos of the organisation, that you will fit in and that you will do what needs to be done without causing everyone a headache.
Which is not to say that there are not roles which demand very specific skills, but I think a surprising number are really looking for generalists who others can work with.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
There's a truism that candidates can seek to be the most attractive, best qualified or nicest.
Attractiveness can take many forms (most intelligent person in the room, most interesting, most varied CV). Best qualified is usually about credentials.
Most candidates for most graduate jobs are trying to distinguish themselves from everyone else on one or other of these and mostly fail almost by definition. You might be proud of your Computer Science degree but you are competing with the people with a Masters degree and and internships at Google and Microsoft.
Being a nice person to work with is something you can prove. You can work on changing your character.
Not every employer recognises it, but I believe many do.
I cannot say anything about fibre-optic cable laying.
Too bloody true.
Believe you me, if a generalist who got the job done and got on with people was what people were really looking for I'd never have been out of work.
@Basketactortale I am living this right now and what you are saying is utter, utter crap.
So, student debt is not just a US problem?
Scottish students don't pay tuition fees. My two both graduated with a manageable £9,000 debt each from their student loans. My son-in-law is English and has massively more student debt than my daughter, although they both went to the same University.
It's one of the reasons that my husband and I are very happy to pay more income tax than we would if we were in England; I think we pay less than £1000 pa more than if we had the same income but lived in England, so we feel as though we have made a net gain.
The down side is that Scottish universities helped balance the books with overseas students paying full fees. My husband made several trips to India specifically to try to attract overseas students to come to Scotland. The clamp-down on visas has made Scotland less attractive and is badly affecting Scottish universities. Westminster has taken away the mechanism which helped Scottish students avoid massive student debt.
You do not get as far as interview to prove what an affable fellow you are if you don't meet the technical requirements. That's the non-negotiable and in an employers' market they can afford to be very precise about it.
Ok. I'm sorry if you are struggling, I assure you it is not crap.
I've explained the context of the thing I'm talking about and I have also said it does not apply to all employers.
I believe it applies to many but in no sense all graduate jobs.
Yeah, that's obviously and pointlessly true. It's no bloody use at all in STEM where it absolutely doesn't apply.
Well that's not true either, I know someone who got a job in a biochemistry lab recently based on their voluntary work experience over all the other candidates who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
But fine, if you don't want to believe it because you already know everything there is to know about graduate jobs across the massive variety of sciences and engineering, you carry on.
I've been trying to find a job since July 2024. I've heard some crappy statements in my time, but that takes the fucking biscuit.
IT IS UTTER FUCKING CRAP!!!!!!!
Read for comprehension and if you insist on continuing to feed such patronising bullshit to people who are having to live this shit then I'll see you in Hell.
I know it isn't your experience which I genuinely am sorry to hear. But it is not crap. Simply saying that someone else's knowledge and experience is crap is not a discussion.
The point here is this bit: who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
Our point is that you can't, in STEM, make up for being less precisely qualified than another candidate by being affable or anything else. The technical closer fit candidate will get it. And those technical fits are very precisely defined.
How do you know this? If a job is advertised as needing a degree, there is no guarantee that a person with a doctorate will get it. For lots of good reasons. For example there is a very great fear that the candidate will quickly leave for a better opportunity.
I can think of several situations where people with doctorates did not actually get jobs which went to people with degrees.
A doctorate, for example, if it is neither a desirable or an essential might be scored but might be weighted differently to other parts of the application. That's entirely normal.