Paying more doesn't guarantee this. Lots of new developers want those top rates and deliver the same sub standard quality. On the other end, expensive consultants can be highly ineffective.

An HR manager once said each hire is a compromise in some way because no two candidates are alike.

One key in hiring remote is to take some extra time to get to know the candidates via video calls to create a connection and better determine what their strengths and weaknesses are, and get the conversation to a point where the compromise is acknowledged and you can talk about their ability to learn what they don't know and examples of that.

How effectively a developer can learn and apply new knowledge is they main thing I look for. Learning while you work is the new norm, but hiring is not always setup that way.

To work with many offshore firms, the “specs” part is a nightmare. The specs might as well be code because common sense isn’t generally so common. For example, sending a forgot password email: actual question: “Should the email go to the email address in the user’s record?” Multiply that by layers of “project managers” and over and over, that means that $35 per hour costs 3 times as much yet yielding a quality level that wasn’t $105 per hour worth.