[dsr_]

If I want a junior person, I place an ad for a junior person. We do quite well with those.

If I want somebody with 5 years of experience, it's because I need someone who has already got familiarity with the tools and can apply good judgement.

I have had both positions open simultaneously on occasion, and discovered the same people applying for both. Some of them were even qualified for the junior position.

[smokinn]

You removed the word "related" in this reply.

I think our contention centers mainly around this word. When I see the word related I envision most standard job offers that have a laundry list of 10+ technologies, not all of them particularly related.

Software engineering is such a wide field with such a huge array of available technology options that if you're limiting to 5+ years in a specific stack you're already massively narrowing down your field to a small percentage of the available workforce. If you aren't offering significant advantages to offset that huge initial filter you're not going to get many candidates you find acceptable.

At the company I work at we hire for "general software engineering ability". You can pick whatever language or tool you want to get through the interview, we don't care. Most strong candidates will ramp up on whatever specific stack way more quickly than you expect.

[dsr_]

To clear this up:

If I ask for five years of related experience, I mean that if my list includes an object-oriented language with a well-known framework, I expect to see someone who has worked with an object-oriented language with a well-known framework and has perhaps dabbled in the particular one I mentioned.

Instead I get many resumes from people who have never used an object-oriented language to contribute to any software project that wasn't assigned by their professor. They haven't got five years of experience, period.

Does that help?

[Mashimo]

When I was fresh out of University I had to send at least 2 resumes per week to get my unemployment money. Sometimes there were no positions open that matches my criteria, so I just send it to what I could find.

The worst I could get was a no :)