Some of the things assessors and interviewers do when judging candidates can really stink. There's no objective control in this space at all and, although a meritocracy is supposed to be in effect, a lot of things (not all) come down to personal idiosyncrasies and the impartial viewpoints of people.
Having done a little bit of graduate assessing and interviewing for my employer and the one before (with the current employer they like to ask volunteers to go along to the Universities for the assessment days to do technical interviews, observe team exercises, listen to the personal presentations etc.) I know how bad it can be.
We all know that people tasked with reading CVs can easily throw things in the bin due to bad spelling, grammar or even formatting they don't like. Of course, that would never mean that person wouldn't be an excellent technician. A dyslexic guy that I know is at the top of his field (I think this is true of a high proportion of people suffering from dyslexia). Once or twice he has been tasked with writing papers for review by senior management, I help him out by reviewing it 'cos I'm OK (not infallible!) with speling, grammer and for'matting 'n stuf.
People removing people from consideration based on handshake I have heard too. People adding weight to a person's chances because they had a pony tail was one of the most surprising... their point of view being that "all people with pony tails make good techies".
Now, even though I know this to be true, I didn't think that the interviewer should say it.
When I was assessing, we'd do a day of exercises with the graddies, then get together in a room that evening, we'd go around each candidate in turn - those that had failed the actual aptitude tests on the day were usually immediately rejected - unless that meant no-one was up for consideration then the bar magically got lowered.
Then, with the smaller set, we'd go round the table and give our opinion... a good technical interview could easily save a poor presentation. We had a selection of people assessing, techies, sales, services etc. and, sometimes, someone would rescue a candidate from VMR (that being a "we Very Much Regret" letter) by saying "she'd be perfect for software development" or "I'd support that guy going into Sales".
I think there's a lot of benefit to being a good all-rounder but, with most jobs, you won't go far wrong if you're smart, punctual, have enthusiasm and have a passing ability to present yourself and your output well. Those things are more important when starting-out (which I am assuming about the OP). All the experience - and the higher pay - comes later.
I think I went off-topic by quite some way there... however, I don't care... I wanted to type something, so I did.