In my experience the noise in a recruitment is generally a reflection of how well you write your ad and how clear you are in your mind about the kind of person

In my experience the noise in a recruitment is generally a reflection of how well you write your ad and how clear you are in your mind about the kind of person you are looking for. Even in a downturn, I doubt anybody wants to waste their time applying for a job they are clearly not qualified for. Through the years I have learned to write much tighter job ads avoiding generic terms like "DBA" in favour of things like "Sybase administrator". At least that weeds out the people who don't know that Sybase is a database :-)