The essence of the modern employment contract is that we keep showing up and doing more or less what we're told, and you keep the paychecks coming until doing so would jeopardize senior management pay, at which point you kick us to the curb with nothing. Anyone on either side of the table expecting something else is delusional.
> I don't want to hire anyone who would be unhappy working for me.
Then you're not going to hire anyone, your empire will stagnate or shrink, and you will not be promoted into senior management. At some point you will be kicked to the curb.
Lying enables you to hire people who might otherwise be unavailable or much more expensive. When the labor market is weak, this isn't very important, but in a strong labor market it can be the difference between growing your organization and losing it to attrition. Assuming you're not willing/able to pay more than your competition (no one is), lying to candidates is going to be among your top tactics. By the time they both know they've been lied to and are upset enough to want to do anything about it, they'll have kids and a mortgage, or there will be another recession, or some other circumstance will trap them. They're not happy, but you are: by growing your team, you've earned a promotion to director.
Sure, your hires are less productive than starry-eyed believers, but there aren't enough of the latter to staff a giant corporation (or even a medium-sized one), and senior management pay is based primarily on the size of one's empire. There's no point in a staffing policy that limits empire growth. A giant company, even a very inefficient one, pays senior managers far more in absolute terms than a smaller, more profitable one. Therefore it's in the interests of the senior managers to encourage hiring as many people as possible as long as they're cheap, regardless of whether they're happy or productive (and don't worry, if business is bad, they can be kicked to the curb). As a line manager, it's in your interest to go along with this no matter what it takes, because that's how you climb the ladder.
> I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers.
It's more that there's little point in asking because the assumption is that you will lie. At best, even honest answers have a very short shelf life; the experienced candidate assumes that conditions will change quickly and for the worse. Most importantly of all, the candidate knows he or she will have no recourse if conditions are not as advertized, regardless of the reason. That makes the answers non-actionable, and thus the questions a waste of time.
> Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult
We don't tell you because we know you don't care. People have been getting a lot smarter about the employer-employee relationship over the past decade or two. A corporation exists primarily for the benefit of senior managers: it gives them a place to compete with one another, engage in cutthroat politics, try out pet theories about business and management, and gives them the lion's share of the business's profits for little or no work. It does not exist for the benefit of the rank and file, customers, or shareholders. Few people are so foolish as to expect anything but misery and insecurity as a member of the rank and file. Why give you information you can use against us later? Put another way, what's in it for us?