I'd like to point out that that is exactly what you want to do sometimes. Our HR department absolutely refuses to put out reqs with anything more specific than

I'd like to point out that that is exactly what you want to do sometimes. Our HR department absolutely refuses to put out reqs with anything more specific than a generic software engineer description, because they rely on having a general pool of applicants that they can shuffle around to different teams. While that might work for most software teams, my team has a couple of specialties that are not just hard to hire for, but also hard to train for, and sometimes take years to learn. If we hire someone with general software engineering expertise, we typically consider their entire first year to be a training year with extremely limited productivity...even if they are a well experienced senior level engineer. So we try to put out more specific requirements: Experience with geospatial information systems and standards. Or experience with constraint programming or other forms of mathematical optimization like LP, MIP, IP, or QP. Or experience with spectrum licensing regulation or 3gpp standards. And because they don't put out easily searchable reqs, we never get candidates that we wouldn't need to train extensively, unless we do their job and seek them out ourselves.