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.
Actually, in many cases there is a real application/interviewing process before the job is advertised. It is not that they do not want a proper process to run, it is that, for some reasons (frequently union-related) they cannot enforce the requirements they really need. So, they, first, do a selection on criteria they care about and then advertise a job description, fitting just the guy they chose (but often not mentioning at all, why they chose him).
It is, actually, worse in Europe, where the civil service rules are even more restrictive.
Well civil service positions would, be definition always filled internally, no? Certain posts might potentially be filled (and contested) by political appointees or civil servants, but posts within a civil service?
Yeah that seems odd.
Where I live, civil service ads are mostly on the high or low ends because the mid level positions rarely make it out of the internal process.
