Your recommendation was to teach a bootcamp to find applicants. This, in my mind, reads like a combined internship / interview that the applicant pays the potential employer to partake in.

OK, that's not what I intended. Teaching a bootcamp is pretty full on commitment so using it solely as a hiring funnel would see you ousted via feedback scores pretty quickly if you weren't delivering on the learning aspect.

The way I see it, and I'm open to being wrong about this, is that people that join a bootcamp are doing so to find a job. If at the end of the course I shoulder tap the best students I've had and we connect on linkedin (or they make the request) and then we end up entering into some kind of internship / jr position, I can only see that as a good thing.

The dev gets a job, I get good staff, the course gets their vague job placement goals met and at the end of the day, software gets written.

The only people I see being disadvantaged is others in the market for a dev. But that's not going to keep me up at night.