Employers keep doors open for really stellar candidates - they keep interviewing - and if such a candidate comes, a position can be created, with overall goal o

Employers keep doors open for really stellar candidates - they keep interviewing - and if such a candidate comes, a position can be created, with overall goal of improving quality of employees. However the pool of extraordinary candidates is shallow, so the stable state is "positions are supposedly opened - interviewing happens - nobody get hired", with rare exceptions. This skews the statistics - everybody reports "hiring and can't find (exceptional) candidates", but workers in fact can't find a job for a long time. It's not whining, it's a strategy, when interviewing costs relatively little. Even startups spend weeks of interviewing for a single candidate, because prevailing opinion is that it's more costly to hire a subpar employee than to do those interview rounds, even in a jurisdiction where laws allow firing with relative ease.