Tech startups are at least partly to blame for this as well. I've seen so many job postings requiring years of experience in exactly the same combination of technologies the company itself is using. I know it's harder to hire people for their innate abilities than it is for the number of years they've done rails or django or rspec but if you're going to be that inflexible you've got nobody but yourself to blame for the empty desks.
I think you are adressing job postings in the wrong way. See it more as a wishlist and not as something with hard limits.
Sure, you still have to be able to fit the role they want or replace someone else that can fit the role, but don't overestimate the importance of the requirements.
There might be a case to take them really serious if the job posting really differentiate between what the candidate have to know and what they wish for. Other than that, don't take them too hard.
> There might be a case to take them really serious if the job posting really differentiate between what the candidate have to know and what they wish for.
That is the problem. Very many of them say things like "flash in the pan technology X a must" or "latest silver bullet Y mandatory". They are basically advertising that their start-up only hire liars and people who actually believe management consultants. And then they are surprised that all the good people run away screaming.
RethinkDB says "For that matter, you think SQL is a terribly designed language." Oh, dear. Refined by the hardest of the hard-core engineers for half a century, foundation of the world economy, and they only want people who have an ironclad, dogmatic belief that it is unconditionally terrible. Good luck recruiting actual information retrieval experts, guys.
