I don't think he was saying exclusively hire from the meetups...he was saying to add that to your recruitment portfolio. There are a number of developers who aren't looking per se but by engaging them in a more social environment than a job board, you have a chance of catching their attention about the new job you're hiring for. The biggest thing that Raganwald never touched on is that many of the best developers won't even apply to your job under normal circumstances because they're content where they are. Getting involved in the community helps engage those people.
I think another over-abused phrase is "smart and gets things done". Thanks for regurgitating Spolsky in your ad. Tell me do you have individual offices for your engineers? No...it's the standard cube farm? Then you don't get to quote Spolsky.
Honestly, there are a lot of crap jobs posing as dream jobs as well. I remember talking to my (female) cousin once and she said to me "People act like it's only good men that are hard to find. The sword cuts both ways." Just because there's a higher ratio of Women to Men doesn't mean that the ratio of good women to not so good women is higher than it is for men. I didn't get what she was saying until I started dating heavily.
In the same regards just because there are more jobs than candidates doesn't mean there isn't just a high ratio of crap jobs. So the same 100 job ads will likely have 1 or 2 great opportunities and 98-99 posers. The candidate's job is just as tough as the recruiter.
