1) Inexperienced Joe's most pressing problem as a result of inexperience is attempting to find a job by looking at job ads. Joe does not yet know, but should learn, that most jobs in fact have no associated ad, and that jobs which do have ads are disproportionately jobs you do not want to apply for. Instead, Joe would have been better off attempting to get his name in front of people who have the authority to hire junior programmers, who are a) legion and b) overwhelmed with their current inability to source candidates who are capable of producing working programs/systems/etc.

1b) Not posted job description anywhere accurately represents all parts of the job, and for the right candidate, companies are willing to ignore virtually anything. The right candidate is "anyone who can convince the decisionmaker that they're the right candidate." Decisionmakers at many companies value grades a lot less than Joe, in his inexperience, believes they do.

2) There actually do exist many companies which invest, heavily, in being the first job you'll ever have. Fog Creek and Matasano spring to mind, and I'd work at either. Both of them do it in part reaction to the fact that if they didn't experienced talent would be available too infrequently and priced too high for them to hire the quantity which they want to hire, which strikes me as a common enough problem that other companies probably adopt quietly the policies those guys adopt publicly.