I’ve noticed an increasing number of employers who post jobs to publicly available web sites before they have fully vetted their internal candidates; why would anyone do this? It used to be that you would look at your internal candidates before you would begin an external search that resulted in an avalanche of resumes.
In the last six months I have run into two of these situations. In the first case, the company even set up an interview, then called to cancel the day before the scheduled appointment saying that they had offered the job to an internal candidate, and this week (and last) I spent several hours trying to apply to a job that disappeared so fast, that it had just replicated from the company’s site to an external placement site, and when I stopped at their office it was on their manual posting board, but not on the site; the only place that you could apply for the position. They also had picked an internal candidate.
I thought the job of IT was to create systems where this would be a thing of the past, not an automation (at the speed of light) of a broken process.