These folks are actually having a hard time finding Perl talent with enough experience. ... Statistically, none of this means anything, but for me personally it's evidence that Perl is quite healthy.

Depends on the reason. I know some people who're having a heck of a job finding decent COBOL programmers. Doesn't mean that COBOL is a healthy language.

Being able to hire decent developers is one of the major factors in picking a language for a project. I know of one successful Perl based e-commerce server that moved over to C++ because the development team had a roomful of good C++ developers and couldn't find any good Perl developers.