I think that's a bit of an uncharitable reading. He anticipates a similar objection with, "You’d lose out on entry level talent! Maybe, or maybe part of your operations would be getting to know college kids." (Emphasis mine.) What I took away from the article is that he's suggesting that your company find other ways of developing relationships with outside people, rather than putting out a call for strangers to line up and jump through hoops when they need to hire someone. Another example: So many companies rely heavily on open source software, but how often do they take the opportunity to form relationships with the people who build and maintain it?

When you say, "What would fix the problem is for people to define 'desirable' in different ways, with a bias toward 'the place that I actually ended up at'," that seems to me very much what he is suggesting.