As I've said many times, HR policies in the United States are messed up and do not promote filling positions. Of particular concern is inflexibility with regards to the requirements of the position, which make the candidate pool unnecessarily small. I've often looked at computer programmer requisitions and wondered if there were even anybody in the world that met all of their requirements, given how exacting and specific many of them were.
If you're looking at professional openings in the public sector, a large share of openings are listed only because of laws or policies that require hiring practices to be non-discriminatory, when in reality the job description was written for the sake of a specific person. The entire application and interviewing process becomes a hollow exercise that is completed only for the sake of following the law's letter.
This is so common, even for non-senior positions, that the career office at my MPA program trained graduating students to recognize these listings so that they wouldn't waste time applying for openings that didn't really exist in the first place.
This is something I have experience with. I work for a public sector employer that is required to post all requisitions for public consideration. Despite this, they often know exactly who they want to fill it. It's a real waste of time since people fill out pointless applications and employees waste time reading them all to go through the motions of a rigged game.
When an FTE position became available in my unit and it was predetermined that I would be the one to get it, I wasn't really bothered (though I did pity the other people) because I'd been the sucker enough times before that. In one case I ended up in a second in-person interview where I met with nine different people over the course of three hours for a position that I had no chance to get. That was a real waste of time all around.
But was the nine person event with the current employer? I've seen cases where someone is put through the paces really looking at them for a different future opening.
