The second email, one minute later
Mika Flowers applied for a junior Solutions Engineer role that asked for a degree she did not have. She did have relevant practical experience, so she tailored her summary, wrote a cover letter and answered a screening question with details of her hands-on work.
A confirmation arrived a minute after she submitted. About a minute after that, a second email landed. Flowers could only guess which part of the application had mattered: the degree requirement, a screening question, or something else. What happened next left her wondering whether her projects had entered the conversation at all.
The two-minute interval leaves room for a threshold check. It does not leave room for the summary, cover letter and custom answer to be opened, read together and compared with the role—and it does not establish what produced the decision.
The requirement Flowers says she did not have was the one credential on the list: a degree. A credential can be checked before the application reaches the summary, cover letter and custom answer where she set out the practical work she offered instead.
She tailored three parts of the application around relevant experience, yet the timing gave her no way to tell whether those materials affected the result.