They can care about work-life balance, because they’re not desperate enough to feel the need not to. And however successful your company has been so far, they have other options they like better.
Hiring is a negotiation, and you’re acting like you’re holding all the cards when you aren't. You’re looking for a highly competitive candidate pool, and you’re not being competitive: you’re just checking the same baselines as everybody else. You're acting like a replacement-level employer and expecting more than replacement-level candidates.
When you accept that you need a great engineer, and not the best engineer, you can deal with the trade-offs consciously. What traits are actually important? How much are you willing to give up to get them? What’s the dollar value of a hire this month versus next month? “What actually matters today?” is the most important question a startup can ask, and you haven't applied it to one of the most important aspects of running a company!
Trying to hire the best engineers is the enemy of actually hiring great ones. You’re going to have to give up something (possibly time, possibly comp, possibly workplace policy) to make the hire you want.
The longer you aren’t thinking about what to give up, the more you’re implicitly choosing to give up time, the thing startups treasure more than anything else.
The default outcome for a startup is always failure. You took a risk by even starting one. You ship things that might be broken all the time, because you know that speed is more important than perfection. You take moonshots, because you know that big wins matter more than small losses. And then you give up months of time because you refuse to apply the same philosophy to hiring!
Stop insisting on perfection, and move fast.
You already live in social credit. We just don't call it social credit.