It would be a good idea to make the phone screen more rigorous. Use some etherpad clone-du-jour and have them write code in the phone screen. This way you'll filter out the bozos more efficiently.
You shouldn't expect somebody hired for an entry-level Java position to even know Java. I mean, at least if you're trying to hire somebody who'd be good, they'll have experience in other languages, and the cost of them catching up on Java is miniscule compared to the cost of them catching up with your codebase, with being a professional programmer in general, and it's certainly less than the cost of searching for somebody who's not quite as smart and talented but has better Java-specific knowledge. If you find somebody who has weak knowledge in _everything_, they might still be okay, but if you find somebody who has fairly good knowledge of other aspects of programming (be it another language, or data structures, or HTML or web programming or some protocols and such) then it's a sign that they're not dumb and are worth considering. You should be comfortable simulating how quickly they'd pick up Java when starting.
Edit: Of course, there _are_ a lot of fresh graduates who are scrubs that can't code, signed up for the video games or the money, and thought they'd just focus on grades and they just suck in general. People with general Java background knowledge who just don't know that Java has exceptions are one thing, people who mess up the exception-throwing syntax or forget about checked exceptions are another. What kind of person are they -- did they go to film school or did they go to "films"? People who went to film school will know what their professors told them to know, people who went to films might not have looked at Java specifically but will have a bunch of other knowledge about programming that they looked at outside of class.
You shouldn't expect somebody hired for an entry-level Java position to even know Java. I mean, at least if you're trying to hire somebody who'd be good, they'll have experience in other languages, and the cost of them catching up on Java is miniscule compared to the cost of them catching up with your codebase, with being a professional programmer in general, and it's certainly less than the cost of searching for somebody who's not quite as smart and talented but has better Java-specific knowledge. If you find somebody who has weak knowledge in _everything_, they might still be okay, but if you find somebody who has fairly good knowledge of other aspects of programming (be it another language, or data structures, or HTML or web programming or some protocols and such) then it's a sign that they're not dumb and are worth considering. You should be comfortable simulating how quickly they'd pick up Java when starting.
Edit: Of course, there _are_ a lot of fresh graduates who are scrubs that can't code, signed up for the video games or the money, and thought they'd just focus on grades and they just suck in general. People with general Java background knowledge who just don't know that Java has exceptions are one thing, people who mess up the exception-throwing syntax or forget about checked exceptions are another. What kind of person are they -- did they go to film school or did they go to "films"? People who went to film school will know what their professors told them to know, people who went to films might not have looked at Java specifically but will have a bunch of other knowledge about programming that they looked at outside of class.