My department has been hiring for months with very little success. There really are a shortage of qualified candidates right now.
But here's the thing...we're in San Francisco where there's a lot of competition. In other parts of the country, there really is a shortage of jobs. Tech work clusters in certain areas. This allows what you're saying to be completely true *and* what is being said in the article to be completely true. You'll noticed that developerauction.com limits itself to SF, LA, NY and Boston...that's where the desperate employers are.
I do sympathize about the formalized HR process...I've been in a constant fight with our HR department over the job descriptions that are posted. They claim that it's worthless to post an ad without a job description. They want things along the lines of, "You'll work closely with Product Management to develop features for our flagship product." My contention is that this is basically implied...every corporate development job can be described that way. I prefer to have the post talk about what we do, what kind of developer we're looking for and our development philosophy. It's an ad that I think would work well if it was posted to the more specialized job boards (Github, Craigslist, etc) but then they post it to Dice and Monster and blame me when it gets almost no response.
I've responded like this in the past when someone claims that employers are being disingenuous, but I'll do it again...if there are any good Java or front-end JavaScript developers in the SF bay area, respond and I'll tell you how to apply...these are $150k+ jobs, so we're not low-balling candidates.