Is hiring a consultant (or two) an option? That is what most companies here do in such circumstances. It will not be cheap, but sometimes that price is low compared to the alternative.

As opposed to lowering expectations, do you have the option of - for example - offering a more enticing salary that might attract more experienced people who are otherwise-content in their current roles? Just in case its relevant to a solution.

@JuhaUntinen , the only problem is, there are no good consultants/contractors available. They are all booked infinitely at sky-high prices. If you call the top handful of agencies, they just say either "there's nobody available" (if honest) or they try to sell you on some mediocre person. The total, absolute, shortage of actual-skilled-professional software engineers .. continues!

@JuhaUntinen we already have contractors in our team and in our company. You can't run the whole company on contractors. @ Kozaky from what I can tell our company offers higher than average salary in our area. The salary is not advertised anywhere though.

Pro-tip: For most (good) developers, the salary is no longer the #1 motivator, as it is already more than adequate. It's about things like work/life balance, generous remote work days, how interesting the domain/tasks are, and even the company culture and agenda (clean-tech etc). Have you emphasized such points in your job listings? If the job listing is fairly bare-bones, most devs will simply skip it, as there are 1000 other companies that say the same things. And if you don't have such, it might be worthwhile to invest into them to attract talent.

how much more slowing down is a trainee than being 1 person short?

@kukis If the salary is really above average why not openly advertise that..?

@WendyG It depends. In the worst case, a useless trainee can turn "1 person short" into "3 or 4 people short", if it takes 2 or 3 people full time to clean up the mess they just made.

Personal anecdote: having the test first is a deal breaker for me. I don't mind taking tests (in fact I'd be mildly dubious about a place that wanted to hire me as an engineer and didn't give me a test), but I won't take it as my first point of contact with a company. Especially without a slated salary range. There are far too many companies out there that offer peanuts and experts. They are easy to identify in a 30 minute phone interview, and I'll move along once it is obvious. However, if you make me take a test first I'll assume you fall in that category (most do) and never apply.

Have you tried to repost the Job advertistment? I knew when I was looking for a Job I only checked for jobs that were less than a week old since there was so many new jobs being put out each day. If your ad is months old, some people might never reach it because they will find a job before they have a chance to reach your ad.

Have your company tried to offer higher salary? I heard that this often helps finding better candidates or at least increases the amount of people willing to apply.

Can you wait until 29th March?

@JuhaUntinen +1 for your pro tip, it should probably be an answer. In my job I'm grossly underpaid (field-wise) and I'm very happy with the company. They do everything but pay increases: new high-street-restaruant-like canteen, huge home office possibilities, tax assistance - simply put they remove pains from my life which can't be paid away with money easily, and it seems to work as a very good filter, since the new people who do join seem to have values compatible with the rest of the company.

Maybe slightly off-topic, but any company that gives me an assignment before a get-to-know-each-other talk is an immediate "no" from my end. Have you considered postponing the technical assessment to a later point? You'll likely attract more candidates if you offer them a chance to drink a coffee and see what your company is all about, instead of bothering them with assignments before they even know if they want to work for you.

What I like with junior dev is that you don't have to make them unlearn thing. They trend to have less "know-it-all" issue and less "I-do-it-my-way". And older have a tendency to think that dev is about code writing and avoid code reading. An in general trying to be a good writter without reading can lead to major issue. Junior =/= lower quality =/= lower expectation.

It seems your company's field is sports betting. It might be completely subjective but I associate this field with organized crime and poor people betting more than they should and getting into debt. I wouldn't want to work in this field and it could be one of the reasons why it's hard to find new recruits.

@Pavel: It sounds great. Could you please share more info about your company?

@EricDuminil is right, your field might affect things. I for once, would never work for a betting/gambling company.

Everybody here is talking about how to make the job more attractive to developers. But in my experience developers work with recruiters, if the recruiter thinks they have someone whose interests and the experience/skills/tech we're looking match they show us the CV, and only when we say we're interested do they tell the developer and maybe we get to an interview. A couple of CVs per month get shown to us is our experience. That's all way before attractiveness to the developer matters.

Have you considered posting an attractive salary in the advert itself?

Ask / talk to your manager. Whether we'd say it's okay or not would be entirely irrelevant if your manager strongly opposes it. You're also probably in a better position than us to judge how much training any given candidate would require, based on the interviews, and how likely it is for that amount of training to make sense based on the priorities of the company and team (and also the candidate, i.e. would they stick around long enough to make up the cost of training).