I think there's a shortage of good candidates, and an abundance of bad ones. Companies who have been burned on the bad ones and/or have convinced themselves the

I think there's a shortage of good candidates, and an abundance of bad ones. Companies who have been burned on the bad ones and/or have convinced themselves they only hire "the best" then put those overly-restrictive barriers on new hires. This problem is made worse by the lack of investment in training once hired, as some are discussing in these comments. Companies become even more reliant on the hiring process to produce the perfect candidate, and employed people are encouraged to stagnate their skills which dwindles the talent pool further. Most companies, in my own personal experience, do fall over themselves to hire proven great candidates right now. Update your linkedin with some engineering accomplishments in in-demand fields like devops, cloud infrastructure, or machine learning, or at well known companies and watch the recruiters circle like sharks in heat.