It worked in the sense that when I was part of recruiting software developers, the resumes we received were all people having previously wrote code in their life. A significant part of them had wrote code in a fashion similar to what we're looking for (c# for a java codebase let's say as an example). A small fraction had used some of the technologies we used already.

My brother in law has a painting shop. Right now he want to recruit a sandblaster. He'll literally hire anyone with enough muscles to pick up the tool and ready to show up everyday at 6am for 8 hours of sweating.

What you call "not an exact match" is already matching precise criteria in fact. I bet you have interviews ! You don't need an interview to get a sandblaster job. You just have to show up a morning at my brother in law company and lift the sandblasting tool ^^

So yeah, SW are recruited - even if we don't see it that way - with pretty stricts criteria. Would you hire someone that has never booted a computer in his life ? Never wrote a line of code ? Never learnt an algorithm in any fashion ? Settling for you maybe is sometimes hiring a java dev for a haskell job. Somewhere else it's hiring a former butcher for a painting one (the guy is pretty good apparently!).