What the hiring manager did was illegal in big way. Think discrimination and very ugly lawsuits. So all it took was one conversion with boss of the boss, and the deal was done. Imagine one of those discarded resumes had someone listed as disabled or part of minority.
That is illegal. If you had placed any value on education, you would have known that and acted accordingly.
Is it? Companies regularly don't bother to look at resumes too carefully, in some cases at all. When you submit a resume electronically for instance, some companies have filters that scan for particular words or phrases, and if your resume doesn't include one, it never gets looked at. Maybe throwing the resumes in the garbage is a bit extreme, but it's not functionally different from being filed away never to be touched again. And it's not discrimination to not hire people based on luck-- that's not a protected class. It also can't possibly be discrimination based on anything other than luck because the resumes were never actually looked at; how would the hiring manager discriminate based on information he or she doesn't know? And it doesn't matter if someone who doesn't get hired is part of a minority or has a disability, because that doesn't mean that they must be hired, only that you can't not hire them based on that alone. Which, again, the hiring manager doesn't know, because the resumes were not reviewed.
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I could be mistaken (and please correct me if I am), but I don't think that companies are required to look at resumes, nor are they strictly required to make decisions based on them (Well, you're qualified Ted, the most qualified in fact. But I'm giving the job to my son.). What's illegal is deliberately choosing not to hire someone solely because they belong to a protected class. And even then, not much will happen without a pattern of that behavior. It's hard to claim discrimination because a single person wasn't hired for a job. The specifics of the story aren't so important, because I think that he point was that resumes aren't viewed very carefully, or necessarily in a way you'd expect.
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That nit picked, I still agree with the others in this thread. It's hard to break into any industry once something like a standardized and accredited degree exists when you don't have that degree, and you will be competing against people who very likely all have degrees. That's a difficult gap to make up in the thirty seconds (max) that someone is reviewing your resume on that crucial first pass. That's not to say that you can't do it. But I think that conceptualizing a "fast" path for yourself to follow may not be as reasonable as it was when the industry was younger.
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EDIT: Awesome, my line breaks show up in the editor but not in the actual post. I guess quote boxes will do...
