For example, almost nobody was hiring for software in my area during the Great Recession and I was laid off from the job I did have. Ended up having to relocate so I didn't starve.
Nowadays there's plenty of people hiring but companies around here tend to underpay.
Mind sharing which area are you referring to? Sounds like Europe :)
Nowadays I'd probably be paid more if I still lived in my hometown that I had to leave (ironically).
Job hopping definitely isn't a big thing around here like in tech hubs - new hires don't get huge salaries starting out no matter how much experience you have.
I think that's the main thing we worry about when hiring. We do have HR do initial screenings, but we have our engineers do the rest of the interviews, so it's very costly for us. We've been bitten a few times because people wanted to use us as a strong stone. We aren't as big as a FAANG, but there are a lot of people who leave our company and go to one. If we spend months finding a person and they leave in 6mo to a year, it's very costly for us.
And it only gets easier after your first gig.
In that instance, where an engineer can easily leave your company, it makes sense to want to ensure they really want the position since interviewing and onboarding are very expensive for a company as well as having someone leave with a bunch of institutional knowledge built up over the years.
It’s also probably the easiest question in the world to totally bullshit with just a vague grasp of what the company does.
“One of the things that really excited me about <company X> is the problems you must face dealing with <such large amounts of data, securing your system, supporting N users on the app at once, syncing data across data zones>” etc etc. or “I think it’d be really neat to work at a company in the <healthcare, finance, whatever> industry because I’ve always wanted to <improve lives, learn about high frequency trading>”
And even if it’s an easy enough thing to BS it should also be genuinely easy to find an exciting reason to want to work somewhere in our field.