That's not very arbitrary. If you're hiring someone, you're always in a position of power. If you're dating someone, there's no power differential (or if there is, that's a problem all by itself).
I get what you're saying, but no one moves jobs every week. The sunk costs of switching employment are significant for the employee, less so for the company.
To a lesser degree, the same goes with vacation time and other benefits. At least in the US, anyway. This is why having some of this stuff coded into law and decoupled from employment takes some power away from employers.
Of course, this is a point of view and not everyone agrees with me, but to me it appears that for a chunk of the population the available jobs do not pay well enough to meet a certain standard of living.
That is definitely true, but it's also pretty much the exact opposite of "always".
What? Can you explain the reasoning behind this statement?
Of course, that scenario happens only in extreme edge cases. Even in a booming economy with a shortage of workers, John Doe is not going to be pursued aggressively to fill the Senior Marketing Manager role.
This makes intuitive sense: employers have a ton of money, so people come to them.
Right now I have a client who needs to hire truck drivers and can't do it fast enough. I asked him what he'd done to make his company the most attractive (pay, technology, perks, etc.). He said he's done nothing.
That's exactly what recruiters and headhunters do. Aggressively nails it.
Most people will never be headhunted.
A candidate has multiple job offers, and decides which one to take.
The company interviews multiple people for a single position, rejecting the others.
There are only a small number of sectors where the first situation is reasonably possible, a lot of us on here are incredibly fortunate that engineering happens to be one of them. For the majority of the job market (by volume of people rather than volume of money), it takes people attempt after attempt to get a job. They don't get to choose between multiple offers, they have to take the first thing that will allow them to pay the rent, and then they have to hold on to it.