[mbg721]

Then if you're hiring entry-level employees, you need to be prepared to accept a naive and unrealistic plan. If they have a plan that sounds like an experienced person's plan, maybe they did their homework and got lucky, maybe they know somebody and got interview coaching, but it's unlikely that their destiny from birth was exactly your job opening.

[madrox]

I think hiring managers tend to be pretty realistic about this (can't speak for recruiters). All we want to hear is that the candidate has a sense of how they want to develop themselves. The best entry level candidate story I've ever heard was from an intern who expressed a desire to learn how to biuld movie animation pipelines. We were an app dev team, but I was able to offer enough insight and experience that we helped him get his next job at WETA.

A candidate's intrinsic development goals become the basis of how managers can best motivate and retain employees. Without this, employees quickly stagnate and fall back to doing the bare minimum of their role. This is true of all levels and not just entry level.