Now that's picky

I just received a note that a job I'd applied for was not in the cards because the hiring manager wanted to hire a quality engineer with a stronger mechanical background--keep in mind here that at my former employer, I produced a workmanship spec that covered various phases of the machining and plating process, and I also was the only QE that wandered into the machining areas.

But hey, if I'm going to be rejected for this reason, I've got some good company in other QEs who would have been rejected for the same reason.  W. Edwards Deming.  Walter Shewhart.  Philip Crosby.  Kaoro Ishikawa.  Joseph Juran.  All of these lacked that "mechanical engineering background" and thus had very little to tell their clients.   It's not like Deming helped make "Made in Japan" nearly synonymous with high quality goods, after all.

Either that, or perhaps the criteria I'd consider overly specific simply reflects an ugly fact  that all too many people with professional credentials have never learned to think beyond a very narrow set of situations, and hence hiring managers feel the need to be overly specific in this way. 

Sad, but understandable, I guess.