[pellucidar]

But hiring IS crazy expensive because of the hours of effort spent by existing employees on the hiring side of the process, and the difficulty of finding "good" candidates who are willing to spend those hours plus even more of their own on the being hired side.

In other industries people just don't talk about spending 6-8 hours a week every week interviewing applicants--not even in high-turnover industries. That's an incredible cost, but it's not counted as a line item, just yet another annoyance of the annoying hiring process.

[ctvo]

Agreed it's expensive.

My claim is it's not expensive enough yet for decision makers to actively explore alternatives. Will it get there as supply of quality engineers decrease? Maybe. Probably.

In my experience the companies I worked at tracked it very well, and we knew exactly how many hours were spent on hiring related work and how much it was costing us. We still used the current industry standard whiteboard, full day approach.

[pellucidar]

Yes, but those hours aren't actually a line item when salaried employees do it, so the expense isn't as visible as other expenses.

I think the perception of a lack of quality engineers in the market is just a symptom of the problem: the expense in time and annoyance of changing jobs and the risk (or experience) of becoming a false negative reduces job mobility and heavily slants the resume stack towards the true negatives rather than the experienced people who would be more actively looking around in a saner market.

I haven't heard of a better explanation for the notion, seemingly unique to software, that so many people floating around the industry are so abysmally unqualified to work at another company in the same industry. There are historical factors, but they don't seem adequate to explain this perceived fraud problem.