Exactly this. HR wanted to hold out for a unicorn candidate when we're geographically in an area that makes finding such a candidate difficult and when the pay they were willing to offer wasn't going to attract a unicorn.
Meanwhile, we were having to spend several multiples the cost of an employee on outside consultants just to keep daily operations going and had been doing so for months.
It probably doesn't help that tech isnt our core competency and we work in an industry that's occupational license heavy, so HR is probably used to being highly selective, but there comes a point where not just cross training somebody that's already been vetted by the hiring manager --and actively resisting it-- when having the position unfilled is costing the company serious money just gets absurd.
HR don't want to hold out for a unicorn. They couldn't give two hoots about your skill. Even if they did they wouldn't be able to evaluate it. HR are simply brokers.
It is a board-level decision on salary ranges that prevents you from hiring "at market".
Clearly there will always be some excellent developers at any given moment, available to work sub-market for their own, irrelevant reasons - and these will be the "unicorns", and typically your dev team will be full of them (somewhat by definition because they have already been hired by the unicorn-finding process).
The question as to why many (most?) highly profitable companies refuse to "pay market" is very interesting and I do not have a good answer to.
The best I can come up with is that actually the company (i.e. the important people in the company: the board) explicitly doesn't want to pay for the best (or even above average) candidates, through some recognition/perception that they "do not need the best". But the development team does want to hire good guys, and so you have a kind of stand-off by proxy between the technical team and the board via HR.
The board may be focussed on a buy-out, or this year's figures or making some kind of an exit. I very much doubt the board for most companies sees developers as anything other than a fungible commodity.
Add in the fact that developers are seen as subordinates to management, and that many developers are already approaching or at their managers' (often low-ish) salaries(1), and I think advertised developer salaries will continue to be massively under-market (there are of course exceptions).
(1)Of course managers often get 100% bonuses while developers do not, so this is an untruth, but humans are emotion-driven and so this barrier remains. Realise that companies will happily pay way more than 2,000 USD per day for the very same resources they will not recruit for more than 75,000 per year, and the picture is complete.
The situation is exacerbated by our inability as a field to successfully discriminate between good and bad hires and our resultant desperate, near religious avoidance of false positives in the hiring process.
This wasn't just a case of salary. This was a case of HR didn't even want to consider anyone that didn't exactly meet the job posting and were unequipped to evaluate what candidates came close enough.
The job was for a devops type role with a very niche healthcare environment. Simple fact of the matter is that very few people that already met the requirements they were asking for exist and expect to be paid market rates as a result. That means most people have to train into the role.
The massive disconnect with HR was that they were totally unequipped to understand what skillsets would translate into the position they were seeking to fill. The massive problem with their process is they weren't involving the hiring manager in determining those skillsets and were actively resisting her input on the matter.
I don't doubt that their were probably candidates that would have been an even better fit than I was that were rejected out of hand because HR didn't know what they were looking at. The only reason my hiring manager knew I evn existed was because she had specifically asked me to apply for the job.
Meanwhile, we were having to spend several multiples the cost of an employee on outside consultants just to keep daily operations going and had been doing so for months.
It probably doesn't help that tech isnt our core competency and we work in an industry that's occupational license heavy, so HR is probably used to being highly selective, but there comes a point where not just cross training somebody that's already been vetted by the hiring manager --and actively resisting it-- when having the position unfilled is costing the company serious money just gets absurd.