HR filters.
The biggest problem with getting a job is getting past the people at the bottom of the HR chain, they have been told to reject any application that fails to meet a set of criteria........ So if their list says 500 hours in command on the A320 if you have 400 hours you will be rejected for the job regardless of any other experience, it is just the way they filter the numbers to keep the number of people they interview down to manageable levels.
This is a problem to the likes of me, I have 400 hours in command of an A320 but also have done the and passed the maintenance course for the aircraft and have aproxamatly 14,000 hours total with 6000 hours in command of B737 but I have no chance of getting an A320 job ( the reason for the small amount of A320 time is that the airline was streaming me for an A330 command but was not flying the aircraft so I was placed with another airline with an A320 to A330 QQC planned just before the A330 turned up with the airline........... Then the airline went bust !).
The people who do the filtering in the HR department are usually know very little about aviation and are given no discretion and I have seen a graduate from ETPS ( UK test pilot school ) with lots of wide body jet time rejected by some junior pen pusher on the grounds that he did not have a qualification so minor that he did not see any reason to mention it on his application.