This isn't necessarily true. You can hand craft a highly independent and empowered team at a large company (pets not cattle), and still have hundreds of candidates to sift through. At JPL, we did this. We were very careful about hiring, but did have many, many qualified candidates to choose from.

But I will say, we were also careful to accommodate candidate schedules as much as possible, but yes, we did pass on folks who were asking for significantly more than others. It's a balancing game.