Pre-Selected Internal Candidate

Requisition was publicly advertised to satisfy corporate policy or legal compliance while an internal employee was already earmarked for the role.

Mechanism mech.pre_selected_internal_candidate Exogenous (no agency) Actor: policyNature: incentiveVisibility: opaqueAgency zone: noneEvidence: supported

📐 On the canonical path

A real opening, described honestly — The requisition describes work that exists now, at a level the team actually needs, inside a band the budget already covers. Nothing here is aspirational: the list of requirements is what the job uses, not what the last four candidates happened to have.

This entry is one of the ways that commitment stops being kept.

What it looks like

Composite excerpts, written to be typical rather than copied. No particular message, company or person is quoted here.

Final round, an aside · minute 41 reconstruction

41:02 Candidate How many people are you seeing for this?
41:11 Hiring manager You are the third external. There is also someone internal who has been covering part of the scope since spring.
41:26 Candidate Understood. Is that a formal candidacy?
41:31 Hiring manager It is. We post externally regardless — that is policy.

What to notice: Nothing improper is described. The posting is real, the process is real, and the odds were set before the first external application arrived.

Barriers where this mechanism operates

Observations this mechanism emits

What this does NOT establish

Cannot be asserted as fact without internal hiring log confirmation.

Causal relations

mech.stronger_competing_candidate_in_final_cohort Stronger Competing Candidate in Final Cohort masks

Interventions targeting this mechanism

int.internal_candidacy_stated_in_the_posting Internal Candidacy Stated in the Posting Where a formal internal candidacy exists against a requisition at the moment it is published, the posting says so and says what the external loop decides.

Reached without being linked

The relations above are one step. This is what the entry reaches only by walking through them — the shape of it, since the list runs long in a registry this cross-referenced.

Bears on12: entity.artifact1Barrier10Mechanism1

Walk it in the graph →

From each side

The same entry from inside each position that meets it: what reaches them, what it means from there, and what happens next given what they control.

Employer policy

What reaches them: A funded requisition, and a posting rule that applies to every requisition regardless of who already works inside the scope.
What it means from there: Consistency across hires is what makes a process defensible. A rule that holds for all requisitions cannot be switched off for one.
What happens next: Publishes externally as the rule requires. What happens to the external pipeline afterwards is not reported back to this layer.

Hiring manager

What reaches them: Someone already covering part of the scope, and a slate of external candidates each assessed inside the hours the loop allows.
What it means from there: Work already observed and work inferred from an interview are not the same evidence. Only one person on the slate has been watched doing the work itself.
What happens next: Runs the external loop as posted and assesses each candidate against a bar the internal work already meets.

Candidate

What reaches them: A live posting, scheduled rounds, and interviewers who prepare. The composition of the slate is not stated.
What it means from there: Nothing in the process distinguishes it from one that is open. Whether a requisition is already promised internally is not a field the candidate is shown.
What happens next: Can ask at the final round how many are being seen and whether any are internal. That answer is available on request and absent without one.