I agree with you overall, and No I don't think that most HR people are that bad, but there are enough to cause changes in the behavior of applicants. I am only arguing against the summary rejection of an application based on something that can be influenced by the gatekeeper. And now back to the 'pearl programmer argument' :)

How exactly are they to get this stack of resumes when the posting is for a 'pearl programmer'? I like watching the job boards to keep an eye on where the industry is, and I suspect you would be surprised by how many times I have seen jobs for a "pearl programmer" over the years -- and with no mention of perl in the post. Now, I assume that the probably eventually gets corrected in most situations; however, I still maintain that there are people that would spell it 'pearl'

Think about the case were you have several recruiters searching for a programmer, one of one of whom posts to a jobs site that an comptentperlprogrammer frequents, I expect that there are at least a few people out there would tailor their resume because the job they are applying was posting looking for a "pearl programmer". Now assume that competentperlprogrammer is one of these people. So now hiringmanager gets a stack of resumes, and rejects competentperlprogrammer outright because s/he can't spell Perl correctly. So while, Competentperlprogrammer did not get the job, at least s/he got his/her resume in front of one more person who would not have seen it otherwise and thereby increasing the odds of getting a job.

And of course, there are also many hiring managers that don't know or care about Perl/Pearl/PERL. They just know that they need someone to fix their system and it was written in something called pearl -- which seems to be common in small growing businesses. so if competentperlprogrammer applied for one of those jobs, s/he might be the only resume that smallbusiness gets.