We are at the moment hiring for a L3 (no fresh graduate but someone with 3-5 years of experience). The role has been open for two months now (it was a backfill). I personally am in charge of the technical screen which is the second interview after the hiring manager. I am already getting a filtered set of candidates after the recruiter and the hiring manager review candidates. Of the 5 that have come my way, I’ve said yes to 1 person and 1 as a yes, pending another technical screen. We are not even wanting an exact match, nor are we expecting cure for cancer. Yes there are a lot of people looking for jobs but you don’t realize how many candidates are just not what their resumes portray. It takes forever to get someone competent in the pipeline and even then, you know nothing about their work ethic. The reason the pipeline is slow is because the candidate pool is flooded with over the top resumes that are not backed by actual talent and once you hire a wrong candidate it is extremely difficult to fire them, even with at will employment contracts.
Any manager will tell you, they’d rather not go through the long hiring process.
> once you hire a wrong candidate it is extremely difficult to fire them, even with at will employment contracts
I live in a country where the probational period is 6 months (Germany), so the law says people can get fired without cause or justification, just give them 2 weeks notice or 2 weeks garden leave.
Even with that, it's a very arduous process to fire people. Even in cases where they repeatedly refused to show up for work, I've seen HR departments asking managers to "try harder". This only makes both the employee and the manager suffer.
The reason for that is simple: HR departments are extremely inefficient machines.