I've yet to see a working survey in HN, especially if the group asked is small (people who applied and/or got hired). I asked the question open now (
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811805), let's see.
From older questions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826312 (and others I can't find right now) it seems companies get good candidates. But the who-wants-to-get-hired and freelancer posts don't get enough contacts, those threads also receive much less upvotes and disappear faster from the frontpage.
Personally I wonder if users realize the who-wants-to-be-hired thread has multiple pages? There's a 'More' link at the bottom because it got over 500 comments.