It's incredibly easy to find people, there's a huge surplus of talent and very few opportunities going. You can scoop up top engineers laid off from big tech companies for small change right now.
Ok, fair enough, "top" has been redefined in our field. PhD research scientists with decades of software dev experience are going cheap. It might not be the exact candidate you want, but they're not really mediocre. If it was any other field, decades of experience and a PhD would be considered a "top" player.