Career Expectations

An email from a younger management scholar came to my attention in relation to an academic job recently advertised:

“The requirement for an appointee to have an outstanding track record of research and teaching for a junior position seems somewhat unethical to me.”

Is it unethical to require someone to be outstanding at what they do?  Or to require some experience prior to appointment in a long-term position? In my interpretation, an outstanding track record of a “junior” colleague might entail not just a PhD, but the PhD consisting of very good research.  Alternatively, one can distinguish good research by publishing an “outstanding” article.  A more interesting question is what the correspondent means here by “somewhat unethical”?  Kantian ethics would not allow for this intermediate position, although a utilitarian ethics might allow space for costs to “somewhat” outweigh benefits.  

I do appreciate the concerns of junior colleagues regarding the mania for ever more publications in supposed top journals, the quality of which are often determined by either citation metrics or subjective academic opinions.  But these concerns should not lead us to abandon a notion of quality.  A better question for a junior colleagye to ask would be: what is my aim in being a social scientist, and how may I meet this aim in an outstanding fashion?