Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have skilled labor shortages at the prices they're willing to pay. Every time you hear an employer claim they can't find someone for a position, inquire about the salary they're offering.
This type of bullshit seems to be widely believed on HN. I work in the engineering department of a software company and I'm closely involved with recruitment and interviews. I'll tell you this: the vast majority of people (over 95%) we turn down are unqualified, period. Meaning, we wouldn't hire them even at half the salary level advertised for the position. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what we're willing to…
(1) You're company maybe an undesirable place to work. In Fresno, CA there are couple self described big-name software firms that fancy themselves "local google". Only willing to hire the best and brightest as it were. But sadly for them, the best and brightest aren't cutting it for them. They verbatim claim the same thing you are now, good salaries, but no one coming in for an interview is worth it. The real truth is that the word has gotten out: their products stink, they treat their employees like children, and their competitive salaries are not that competitive in the larger market. The so called "best and brightest" just avoid their front door.
(1b) Just highlighting something in part 1. You are getting what you are paying for and that means you are not paying well.
(1c) Your other employees suck. I don't want to work at a place where people are rude or incapable or working in teams, or simply bad at their jobs. It makes my experience worse. Whenever an interview goes well, I always ask to meet the rest of the staff, if only just for a second. To see what they are like.
(2) Your interview process is flawed. Assuming (1) is provably untrue, then it might be time to take a good look at the interview process you are employing. I've been through so many interviews where it was clear that the (wo)man doing the interview was simply looking for someone to solve exactly one problem, or the name a specific function, or the input format for a function in a given language, or for me to suggest a specific solution(and no other), etc.
Worse still, the moment you cannot answer the question or suggest that a simple Google search would help produce a more ideal solution, or lord forbid simply suggest that an alternative solution might be better, there is this shift in perceived power. It almost seems like the interview process can be an adversarial means of verifying that the interviewer is indeed smarter than the interviewee. At this point during such "skills test" interviews, I politely tell the interviewer that I'm not the candidate they are looking for and conclude the interview.
(3) You haven't gotten the word out. How many people really know that your company is looking for someone (1, 10, 100)? Are you really getting the message out to the greater engineering community. Perhaps you are only reaching a single subset, and that subset is not skilled in what you are looking for.