One of the reasons we adopted MAS so many years ago was the fact that there was a reasonably large local pool of job candidates for the accounting department that already had significant, MAS-specific experience. Even though we use what was called MAS 200, the commonality down to MAS 90 was sufficient to open a number of doors. Generally we had a wide range of people to interview that met this basic requirement whenever there was a job opening. Lately however, our experience has been quite different.

After almost two months of newspaper, website, Monster and other job board advertising, there's been exactly one person that claimed MAS familiarity (and even then it turned out to be fictitious, it seems). On the other hand, everyone seems to know Quickbooks or even Peachtree accounting- obviously products that aren't even in the same league.

Is this something specific to our Orange County, California job market or are others of you experiencing the same frustration? Are we being unreasonable to expect an accounting clerk or full-charge bookkeeper to already know how to use the (what we thought was industry standard) tools that we have?