It's even more fun in public institutions, e.g. universities, where a higher amount of perfunctory humouring of external candidates is required in order to create a somewhat more convincing appearance of an equitable search.

It's the natural consequence of a world where performance is difficult to measure, people are largely fungible, and next to nothing that you personally do will move the needle in whether your employer will be successful.

In that situation, why wouldn't you hire and promote your friends? All of the incentives are aligned for doing just that.

How much of it is "hiring friends" vs just hiring someone you have better information about? A lot of people interview exceptionally well but it's always something of a crapshoot how well they will do in the actual job. But for an internal candidate you should have a lot better information on how well they performed in other roles. You can have actual frank conversations with their managers/coworkers instead of getting BS references from people the candidate themselves chose for you to talk to.

Yeah, there are a few jobs I could recommend a specific person for because I know they are very good due to past experience. When opening come along though, they are usually not looking to change. But if they were... some would say I just recommended a friend, which happens to also be true.

And full-on nepotism is known to be bad. My bet is that blind recruits would perform just as well or better as the family and friends of the recruiting manager would if you'd run the experiment.

That may well be true, but I would not necessarily equate "hiring internal candidates" with "hiring family and friends".

I think this is an overly cynical take. Reputation and VERIFIABLE track record are what is being selected for here. If a hiring manager views this as known for a candidate, there is basically nothing someone else can do to complete. The hiring process simply isn't sufficient to do this fact finding.

In my org, managers aren't really friends, but they do have trust. A strong recommendation is impossible to overturn.

Trust is really the main motivation in a lot of these situations. Imo, the value of “networking” in business is building trusting relationships with other people. I’ve gotten jobs by referrals from others, and helped other people get jobs via referrals. In those situations the referred candidate had an enormous advantage over the candidate off the street, but it’s not a system of buddies looking out for each other. It’s a system of people who’ve spent time establishing trust with each other.

It's the same reason why friends set up friends for dates. If you go "public" with apps, you can be setup with literally anyone. It often doesn't go well.

> why wouldn't you hire and promote your friends?

Furthermore, do you want your colleagues to be motivated by loyalty or by competition?

Loyalty, obviously. Competition means focusing on competing with other employees and not focusing on the company's goals.

Loyalty means hiding miss-steps, cronyism, and incentive to make your boss look good no matter what. That is orthogonal to the company's goals.

Competition means hiding miss-steps, sandbagging your co-workers, and optimizing for looking good. These are also orthogonal to the company's goals.

What's funny is when it backfires.

ie, there's an alumni who now works at a top 5 lab in the field and is now looking for an opportunity to move back to his hometown (for whatever reasons). Job description was obviously written with someone within the institution in mind, but then this person shows up.

I wish I remembered where I read this so I didn't have to post it unsourced and lacking so many details, but I heard about something exactly like this happening: some government agency conducted a search with a tailor-made job description, intending to hire an internal candidate. Along comes an external candidate who also happens to tick all the boxes, but also has slightly more experience with one of the skills. Since they were required by law to hire the "most qualified" applicant, this presented a problem.

So, what did they do? Close the search without hiring anyone, then open a new search with the same job description, adding another skill that only the internal applicant has (I think it was fluency in Italian).

The moral of the story, if there is one, is to never underestimate the ability of people to get a desired result by exploiting the system in an unforeseen way (i.e. hacking). :)

I have been that external candidate. I saw a random job on USAjobs a few years ago that really seemed to fit all of my experience so I figured I would apply for the heck of it. Within a few hours the listing was withdrawn. Weird. Then the same thing popped up again and again over the next couple of weeks and I would apply and it was immediately withdrawn again.

Good to know what was really going with that now.

I experienced this when a job req was opened specifically for me. It was odd having to interview knowing good and well I was getting the job. I used the time to talk with the professors like a real interview and then used the last 15 minutes to ask for advice for how I could interview differently in the real world.

Sometimes that ‘favored’ person has done a lot of work to create the opportunity that they are going to fill.

(For instance that person might have done a lot of work to get a grant, or convince higher ups to make money available.)

I've been on the other end of this. The person in charge of hiring me took my resume and qualifications and used that to template the job posting, so I would be the most perfectly qualified candidate too.

Ditto. I've had my a set of requirements that generalized one level of abstraction over my niche resume so it wasn't nearly as obvious. The org wanted to hang on to me because they knew I'd leave if I didn't get a significant raise and no good mechanism to give me raise except advertising a new position at a higher starting salary (my raise) than closing my old position. Their retention strategy worked and I stayed another 2.5 years.

I went through hiring committies and even had to recompete for my own position, of course the cards were stacked in my favor.

Hiring processes are a joke across the board. I feel sorry for anyone who applied to the position wasting their time. I'm confident I've been on the other side of this before where a position matched so well the chances a real competitive qualified candidate that wasn't already targeted seemed low considering how good a fit I was for the role.

For my first ever job, I was hired from an internship, and one of my last tasks was to write the job description I'd be applying for, such that I would be the only viable candidate. What a pointless exercise. I think that might have been my introduction to how dumb the world of working for a living was going to be!

> I think that might have been my introduction to how dumb the world of working for a living was going to be!

If that's the case, then maybe it wasn't a pointless exercise. Just an annoying and silly exercise.

This just happened to me. Recruiter reached out, asked for my resume because he had a job that looked good. I gave it to him, and 2 days later he called back saying that while they liked me, they were going with an internal candidate. Why bother with the whole charade if you're going to go with an internal person anyways?

> Why bother with the whole charade if you're going to go with an internal person anyways?

My understanding is providing a nice song and dance for legal reasons.

One of many ways that what the HR function has grown into simply adds overhead and friction with no actual value. An HR leader could argue that they are adding value by protecting the company from lawsuits or other risk by instituting this "fair" hiring process. But if everyone knows it's a sham, and that the internal candidate is going to get hired regardless, there is no protection in fact. It slows things down and increases costs, and does not truly reduce risk, improve results, or anything else it might be claimed to do.

> A company can't allow for nepotism or favoritism, so it requires a public posting for any open position

It's not even just a feel-goody policy by dysfunctional HR depts. The US DoL literally requires a company to advertise a role for a position that is currently filled by a PERM labor certification applicant (which is required for green card applications).

Many parts of the USG require "veterans preference" for most positions, meaning they have no choice but to hire one. You can see the reasoning for it, but it limits your abilities to hire who you want.

I had a boss once the said “nepotism will get you everywhere “. I didn’t agree with his philosophy, but his candor was refreshing.

In Ottawa the federal government is required to post jobs publicly like that and people were still gaming it by opening the posting for just a short period of time and telling the preferred candidates when to apply. Now there's a minimum number of days they have to be up.

Usajobs.gov, is that you?

"The managers hire the internal candidate they wanted to hire anyway"

I was surprised how common that is. I've seen that dozens of times happening at Amazon (also for keeping external contractors, when the whole teams fled; the whole hiring process is pretty much bs btw)

If the team is growing and getting more work, then these are most likely genuine. If not, they're quite likely insincere. The "insincerity quotient" will rise depending on level :) . So, for internal staff/sr. staff positions, the decision has already been made or the candidate pool has been narrowed to 1-2 people even before the position is posted.

The far more common scenario (At least at the companies I have worked at) is that an external applicant is desired but because US laws require a posting, one is made, even though that posting is there only to comply with the law and the company is basically already in the process of hiring the external candidate.

> because US laws require a posting

US law does not generally require a job posting before hiring an employee. There are exceptions, however, including government employers, some government contractors, and employment of foreign nationals (e.g., H1-B visa workers).

I was definitely talking about these cases and they are very common.

Immigration law also requires it too, which is sometimes why some job postings are hyper specific; they’re tuned to fit literally one person.