Most people in this area are now older. I'm approaching 40 and I was recently at a tech demo and everyone around me seemed to be older than me. I remember taking Assembly in college and our professor explicitly telling us that we would not need to know any of it, but it was a good foundation to build on. As far as I know, of the people in that class I'm the only one that ended up actually writing a ton of assembly after joining a semiconductor company. Most of the embedded people were from EE, but didn't actually have as much of a programming background. I had approx. 2 college courses dealing with hardware in undergrad and that was not enough.

So, it seems you need to either accept a recent CS grad who seems adept at programming and can learn, or pony up the 200k+/yr to poach someone if you want to hire quickly. Most people I know that have done embedded work tend not to move around a bunch and aren't motivated by small amounts of money to move jobs, so you'd have to offer a large incentive to find the good people.