That even-thirds technique is dangerous when, for example, the company has a basic job template and the hiring manager adds their real position requirements to the bottom of the list. I've watched managers do this. A candidate following your even-thirds split would lie outright about the most important requirements on that type of job post.
I agree that my "even-thirds strategy" is a bit... coarse. For every job description (and potential submission), you gotta apply a little bit of common sense to the equation. And yes, it is possible that the most important stuff is at the bottom (although I feel this is somewhat rare).
But I don't necessarily agree with your point about specificity. Here's why:
I've seen multiple occasions where an HR person is trying to put together a job listing to be posted online. They know that this job will be with, say... the dev ops team, so they talk to the dev ops manager and they ask that person for a list of all the technologies in the dev ops environment.
If that team/company has been around a while, they probably got a little bit of dang near everything lurking around. A stray VB.NET app over here, some ancient legacy Websphere sever over there. And of course, if you're in dev ops, you might need to "touch" all those different technologies, but that doesn't mean that you need to be functionally knowledge about nearly any of them.
I've literally seen job postings where they list a half dozen specific programming languages, and a half dozen specific database engines, and a half dozen different operating systems - but no one actually has to know all/most of that stuff to do the job.
As for your story - yeah... that's a classic example of what I'm talking about. In my experience, it's extremely rare that you ever get called out on such a detail - although it's obviously possible. And just as the process seemed to end favorably for you (even after getting "called out"), I believe it almost always ends up favorably for others who apply the same "creative truths".
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I agree that my "even-thirds strategy" is a bit... coarse. For every job description (and potential submission), you gotta apply a little bit of common sense to the equation. And yes, it is possible that the most important stuff is at the bottom (although I feel this is somewhat rare).
But I don't necessarily agree with your point about specificity. Here's why:
I've seen multiple occasions where an HR person is trying to put together a job listing to be posted online. They know that this job will be with, say... the dev ops team, so they talk to the dev ops manager and they ask that person for a list of all the technologies in the dev ops environment.
If that team/company has been around a while, they probably got a little bit of dang near everything lurking around. A stray VB.NET app over here, some ancient legacy Websphere sever over there. And of course, if you're in dev ops, you might need to "touch" all those different technologies, but that doesn't mean that you need to be functionally knowledge about nearly any of them.
I've literally seen job postings where they list a half dozen specific programming languages, and a half dozen specific database engines, and a half dozen different operating systems - but no one actually has to know all/most of that stuff to do the job.
As for your story - yeah... that's a classic example of what I'm talking about. In my experience, it's extremely rare that you ever get called out on such a detail - although it's obviously possible. And just as the process seemed to end favorably for you (even after getting "called out"), I believe it almost always ends up favorably for others who apply the same "creative truths".
Thank you for the detailed feedback!