I always knew those chickens would revolt one day! (think you meant chicken coop...)
I'm starting to see the pattern too. You hire for "team spirit", i.e., people that are happy to sacrifice their weekends and evenings for the mission of your company.
Old dogs, as I'm starting to become, will rather tell you that you need to work harder on your strategy, work harder on your product, avoid feature creep and sales outflanking. They might also tell you that you need management more than engineering. But enough of inconvenient truth, back to hiring juniors.
Just to make sure I don't offered anyone. A successful org needs both: fresh minds and experience.
you're proposing the same monkey dance that signal "skilled, but will ccept to be treated as a cog" which hr loves but is ultimately demeaning and dehumanizing - while the valuable jobs market moves on completely different gears
we're specialized knowledge worker, which just happen to have had our profession born after feudal ages, otherwise we'd be in the lawyer/architect/doctor brackets. we're slowly raising up there but just because of the labor market growth is getting stripped by the labor demand growth in our sector, but take not of this, unless something changes fast about how we see and market our profession, we're going to get pushed back into blu collars bracket as soon as the situation stabilizes.
You need to position yourself as a consultant with a clearly defined area of expertise, your own site, blog, etc. A salaried employee these days is first and foremost a team monkey hired to please the boss, and only then a skilled professional. When you need someone with actual expertise, you hire them transactionally to solve the problem and keep them on a separate frequency from the usual chicken coup business.