Yes, there's always a "shortage" of workers willing to work for less than market rate, just like there's always a "shortage" of free beer. That's market equilibrium.
It's clearly not a shortage in the economic sense, but it still makes sense to frame it as such, if you're buying labor.
Scenario 1: People are starving. There is not enough food available, at any price, to meet the need, and there is a hard lower bound on how much is needed. We say that there's a shortage of food.
Scenario 2: There is a supply-and-demand situation for some limited good, and some who desire to use that good get priced out. This is the normal functioning of a market. Those who get priced out, though, complain about a "shortage" of that good. What they actually mean, though, is not an absolute shortage, but a shortage at the price they are willing or able to pay.
I think the STEM shortage is the second kind. Sure, your company could do all kinds of nifty things if engineers were abundant and free. That doesn't mean there's a "Scenario 1" shortage, though.
In the meantime, the engineers want jobs that pay twice as much as their current ones. There's a "shortage" of those, too.