"More competition" - but the company still has just a finite amount of time to evaluate candidates.

I've been on the hiring side - if you want a very senior engineer and want to vet them properly, there's nothing fast about the process.

You have access to a million senior engineers but who cares if you only have two engineers on your side that are qualified enough to interview them and those engineers are still expected to ship code, do code reviews, alongside doing interviews?

If you can deliver a fantastic interview where you code on demand, talk architecture tradeoffs intelligently, the leverage still belongs to you as the engineer.

Regardless of the number of candidates.