You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well. Put another way, you may get more qualified people in absolute numbers, but the signal-to-noise ratio could go up, too.
One option is to find a qualified technical individual - either someone on staff (such as a systems administrator), or someone from outside the company whose opinion you trust (perhaps a service provider, or perhaps the lead developer at your friend's startup, etc.).
Find someone who doesn't actually want the job, but who has the skills to help you narrow things down. Trim out the people who obviously aren't qualified (or who didn't even read the job application properly). Pay him by the hour (his normal IT wage, $75-150/hr, whatever he's worth) to sift through the resumes you've narrowed it down to. Have him pick out the most qualified or most interesting candidates with little annotations as to why yes or why no. Doesn't have to be complex - notes like 'Only Microsoft experience listed', or 'lots of experience with web app development' or 'he lasted four years at BlahTech; if he weren't awesome they'd have fired him after three months', or 'he wrote half the code on the database system you're using'.
It's something he could probably do in his spare time, lounging at home on the couch with a stack of PDFs. If he spends five hours at $100/hr over the course of a week, that's $500 that went towards not wasting your time in useless interviews, or less risk of hiring the wrong person and wasting far, far more. That could be a dozen first-round phone interviews you've skipped over by narrowing the candidates down. If each interview is an hour long, that's a day and a half of everyone's time saved.
It's pretty easy to find someone with technical skill if you do your research; the hard part is finding someone who's looking for a job, or at least the one you're offering specifically. A 'clueless' manager won't know what to look for in a candidate, but if they can narrow things down and then hire someone else who can, it can save a lot of time and money.
An outside person has no "skin in the game," thereby creating a skewed incentive structure. Paid by the hour, the incentive is to process as few resumes as possible. Paid by the resume, the incentive is to reduce th effor per resume.
Personally, I this kind of work terribly tedious, at best. One would have to pay me at least double my normal rate.
The traditional model might call this role an "in house" conteract recruiter, and I doubt the good ones get paid what a good programmer or sysadmin do, thoug perhaps they should.
"You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well."
...which is why you have a screening process.
When people are complaining that there are no good programmers (and this is a common complaint on HN; it's not just a straw man), there's at least one of two things going on:
Maybe the interviewing process is different where you are, but around here the salary is normally not mentioned in the posting - you'd normally get asked about your salary expectations once you've been through the interview.
I will not attend a long interview process if the salary is completely unknown. The least I do is to tell the possible employer what my expectations are and check whether this is ok for them.
Of course it would be better to make them define a salary range, but until now I was never able to do this.
It's a question of supply and demand. An hour or two for someone who is already working can be quite annoying when it's a dead end. On the other hand, it may lead to future opportunities.
Once you reach senior level development in popular technologies, companies are often eager to come after you. (At least, that's what the recruiters and help want ads seem to indicate about senior level J2EE developers around the Philly area.)
As the parent pointed out, in some areas/countries it's completely uncommon to announce salary ranges in job ads. What are you going to do then? Never apply? Move to another country?
I no longer apply to jobs where the salary is not advertised. After turning up to a few interviews in the past where the salary was well below market rate I don't bother wasting my time any more.
I'm trying to bring up an automated screening service at http://codeboff.in/ (self-promo alert) because I think we need way more of these, especially being the sort of people who could make them.
There is already codechef.com, codility.com, spoj.pl, online-judge.uva.es, ideone.com, turingscraft.com, etc. How is your service going to be different?...
In my experience when someone is looking on the top-end of the salary range, they NEVER post that to a job board. It's done through networks and well established recruiters. I've never seen a $150k+ programming job, my only exposure has been through recruiters contacting me working on filling it.
