This is the opposite of my experience. When we greatly narrowed the pool of applicants from "people who want to work on live video" to "people who want to work on live video for gaming", we saw a huge uptick in how many people were interested in working for us.
TwitchTV is more attractive for programmers than Justin.tv ever was. There is something to be said for appealing to a smaller group of people more strongly.
Great comment. May I suggest for discussion the following proposition:
There is a difference between narrowing the pool of applicants by being specific about things directly relevant for the job and narrowing the pool of applicants by being specific about things only indirectly related to the job.
“We’re looking for Haskell Programmers” is not the same thing as, “We like to hire MIT Graduates."
This is a HUGE difference. It makes the job ad go from we want "someone good" to we want "someone with skill X". If the manager of the project isn't competent enough to know what they are hiring for (skill X) then that is a red flag.
If you need to filter the applicants more then ask them to answer a question on their approach to a common problem or provide a code sample whichever makes more sense for the particular scenario.
That seems to be less a narrowing and more adding information to candidates about what the job actually will be. You've just added candidates who want to work for gaming and are able to do live video to the pool of people who can do live video and don't really care what kind of video it is.
Providing accurate information about the company allows job seekers to self-select, increasing the signal, and offering an interesting application is far more likely to attract top talent than advertising for code monkeys.
TwitchTV is more attractive for programmers than Justin.tv ever was. There is something to be said for appealing to a smaller group of people more strongly.