And the answer is "almost never, unless there are formal requirements for the appearance of a hiring process, which companies will tend not to put in place unless legal/contractual/csr obligations around hiring force them into doing or they really don't trust middle managers' ability to promote". Even a charade of a hiring process costs time and money (and much more so than an RFP process)
Even organisations like universities that have formal requirements to advertise [certain positions] externally will stick to doing the minimum allowable (which might be a poorly written and overly demanding job spec put up on the org's own careers page for the shortest allowable time and any responses binned) if they've actually already made the decision.
Of course there's also a tendency of people to confuse the charade with the more common case of a position being genuinely open and contested and an internal or existing relationship candidate applying (and sometimes but definitely not always being favoured), especially if they just missed out on a job after thinking their final interview went well...
In my experience it's the opposite. I personally know this has happened for probably over 100 positions, and that's not based on rumors but something I witnessed. And I saw that across a half dozen organizations ranging from 100-10,000 employees.
So "almost never" is almost certainly wrong. My sample size is small, but it's big enough that when it happens 100% of the time it suggests it's the norm.
Your assumption that organizations are efficient might be wrong. I'm basing my judgment on observation and you're basing it on theory.
You personally know of over 100 cases where the company didn't have any sort of formal policy obliging it to advertise jobs, but went through a full fake hiring process with multiple candidates it was committed to not hiring just for the fun of it?!
(Your assumption that my understanding of hiring processes is based wholly on theory might be wrong)
By adding that clause to your statement, you're essentially nullifying your argument. "It almost never happens, except when it always happens." So I ignored the latter half because otherwise your statement seems pretty useless. Because then we're ignoring most of the data because...well just because, I guess.
Sure, if we discount all the times it happens by default, maybe your argument makes sense. But that's like saying let's ignore the majority and only focus on the exceptions and extrapolate to make conclusions about the majority.
You're answering a question that nobody asked. And I'm the person that asked the question.
Even organisations like universities that have formal requirements to advertise [certain positions] externally will stick to doing the minimum allowable (which might be a poorly written and overly demanding job spec put up on the org's own careers page for the shortest allowable time and any responses binned) if they've actually already made the decision.
Of course there's also a tendency of people to confuse the charade with the more common case of a position being genuinely open and contested and an internal or existing relationship candidate applying (and sometimes but definitely not always being favoured), especially if they just missed out on a job after thinking their final interview went well...