Then you read that companies are trolling through people’s Facebook pages and refusing to hire them because there’s a picture of them drinking a beer.
That isn’t how people who are desperate for qualified employees act.
Plus are the qualifications realistic? They put together these ridiculous specifications that no one can match. There’s even a phrase for it - searching for a unicorn.
That IS a big part of it. At my former job, one of my many responsibilities was to write the assembly instructions for the myriad of models that ran down our production lines. These had to be clear, detailed, and precise enough to satisfy our other engineers, as well as satisfy our OEM customers with a quality product in which a lot could go wrong if assemblies were not followed to the letter. Yet these instructions also had to be appropriate for our production line employees, almost all of whom had a high school degree at most. In a prior life I sometimes wrote instructions for electromechanical "kit" type assemblies for my own customers.
In fact, for my entire life my technical writing skills, and my writing skills in general, have been very good.
So... When the company I worked for essentially imploded, and I was laid off in 2008, I initially spent some months futilely looking for work in my own field. After essentially getting nowhere, I also began to look very seriously for work as a technical writer. If nothing else, I certainly could write a better owners manual for most consumer items than, oh, about 95% of what one comes across these days. What I found though, in my job searches for technical writing positions, were all sorts of those "specifications" and qualifications that you mention. Per those, I was not qualified. Whether one could actually write clearly did not even seem to be a major consideration.
As it turned out, parallel to job hunting, I restarted my "prior life" business, including contract work services. It took a "frightening" length of time, but before our savings ran out, the contract work came through. Plus some other parts of my work, while not always immediately profitable, at least help build the business. The funny thing is, in almost all of it (my present work), good technical writing skills are a large plus. I even occasionally get compliments on it. :-)
I think that part of what is going on is that companies post lots of openings, but they are actually lukewarm about hiring someone. If they find what they consider to be a perfect match, at a modest salary, and they do not have to invest much in training, they might hire. But if they don't find that person, it's ok to keep looking for "the unicorn".
Now, someone else did mention the uncertainty of contract work. That's true, but there is not much certainty in employment by others, anywhere, anymore, I'm afraid...