The intriguing thing here was that I had warned the person offering me the job that I didn't have a degree. He said something like "don't worry, we just put the

The intriguing thing here was that I had warned the person offering me the job that I didn't have a degree. He said something like "don't worry, we just put the degree requirement in the job advertisement to appease HR" and seemed very confident that it wouldn't be an issue. Later, he said it wasn't possible specifically because of the British HR, whose hard requirements he didn't know of. Since I have no reason to think that he might have changed his mind on me or something like that, it really does sound like the UK department were stricter in this case. That said, I can understand how it probably looked from their perspective - they would have had no reason to trust the recommendation of a manager from another department (from another country no less!) without any paper qualifications to go on.