What have people been doing?

I work at a public HPC center and we cannot compete with industry so we cannot afford to hire anyone with experience nor can we afford to hire anyone with an amazing academic track record. So we hire juniors with 0 YOE and a sketchy CV and we give them 6 months where their main goal is to learn the craft. And it honestly works amazing well. I don't know why industry is so focused on hiring only seniors because there's lots of good talent out there that could be had for much cheaper.

When we interview we don't try to assess how much technical knowledge the candidate has, but rather, of the things which they have gained experience in (and they are allowed to dictate this), how much can they confidently relay to us. From this we can estimate how much talent the candidate has. We get some interviewees with seemingly strong CVs e.g. particle physics PhD who does Kaggle in their free time, but then they are not able to explain in detail anything they have done. We also get some interviewees who have seemingly mediocre CVs e.g. bad grades, didn't publish their thesis and bare github, but they turn out amazing.

I guess my point is, experience is not talent, and some good talent does not sell themselves well and for the rest you get inundated with mediocre talent who know how to sell themselves.