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That's a reasonable point. However, there are some cases of spousal hiring where the "leading" partner has already been at the university for a long time and wants a spousal hire because they started a new relationship with someone from another institution. In this case, it's less clear that there's no principle agent problem (for example, the "leading" partner might have personal ties to people involved with hiring at the university that induce them to make a spousal hire they wouldn't have otherwise).
This would be a case of a retention policy rather than a hiring policy. I think a lot probably comes down to how "officially" that retention policy is embraced as opposed to whether it's just a secret back room deal made between the "leading" partner and the specific person/people in charge of the hiring.
I'm thinking of an example, a clear, official policy that I've seen in a large organization concerning remote work and retention. It unambiguously said that a factor in deciding whether or not to allow an existing employee to transition to remote work may be retention on the basis of their spouse needing to relocate for their own job. One might complain that this is treating such a person "unfairly" compared to a similar employee who has no such spouse. Nevertheless, it's stated upfront and embraced by the organization's official processes as a mechanism by which they can increase retention of valuable employees. For a university that can't have their star prof working remotely (presumably located at a "lesser" campus of wherever spouse got a job), they'd prefer that their retention policy explicitly allow for a tradeoff of "we can possibly find a way to hire a new spouse as a way to increase retention of high-performing profs".
Of course, it's unlikely that any such retention policy is going to have every detail of how to judge a particular situation completely laid out. It might say that this sort of deal is generally plausible and could be in the interest of the institution, but needs approval up to some level to ensure that it's not an exceedingly flawed deal (e.g., you're not hiring the spouse into some position that they're completely unqualified for or paying them some rate that is just totally unreasonable for the job they're being hired into). I can at least imagine explicit policies/procedures like this which try to get rid of the principle agent problem, specifically by trying to put some distance between the "leading" partner who is benefiting and the authorizing authority. Of course, if the "leading" partner has close personal ties to whoever it is that is named as the approving authority, then one would go back toward considering whether that creates concerns. It's a bit of a delicate balance, but could at least plausibly be done.
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Yeah that version sounds much more like standard nepotism. I was thinking specifically about the version where a spousal hire is offered as an incentive to a new recruit.
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