My last job did the internal promotion but needed to be "competitive" thing. Long story short i was an operator and ended up working extensively with a staff engineer. A opportunity to become a technician opened up and I applied. I was told I could have the job with pay raise but would need to give up my permanent position for a contractor position(no pto, no paid holidays, no insurance, no 401k etc). I turned it down, this staff engineer heard and agreed it was bs, he made a deal with my supervisor at the time to "borrow" me for 6 months for a project he was doing. I did the project and the paperwork and a bunch of stuff. He then took all the work I did to senior management and argued that I deserved the technician job based on the work I did. He got them to agree to create a full time technician role for me under him. The job was literally created for me, he asked for my resume before creating the job requirements and wrote the requirements so my resume would be a perfect fit.

He was still required to do 4 other interviews with people outside the company. They had 0 chance to get the job. It was a waste of hr, his time, my time, the interviewee time. Literally no benefit to anyone.

I worked for him for about 7 years, one of the best bosses I ever met. He was not liked by some people because he had no problem telling you that you are an idiot if you were being an idiot. That said he got projects done, normally with in time and financial budget and without much technical debt going forward. Yeah things sometimes went wrong but there was also some wiggle room for that stuff within reason. For example writing a report for a study was about 1/2 a day but was on the time line as 3 days. Let's say someone calls out one day during the test or a part is delivered late which is critical for what we were doing. Adjust the time line so now there's 2 days to write the report, still easily enough time and everyone is happy as it was delivered on time.