Do promotions require job postings?
For context, I work in a private university as staff, and I do many things that are not in my job description. My department mentioned that they would like to "promote" me to a position that actually describes the things that I do. However, they mentioned that they would have to post the job posting and then I have to apply and see if I get it.
The issue I have is that I saw this with a colleague already, and indeed they did a job posting and actually got to an "onsite interview" stage with both my colleague and another aplicant (who we flew over). However, from our conversations it seem obvious that this job posting was rigged and the external applicant never had a chance from the get go. This feels shitty for everyone because we were wasting the external applicant's time, my colleague had to apply do the interview as if he wasn't already doing everything the job posting asked for, and clearly the committee evaluating the hire was just in a massive conflict of interest (how can you be objective when evaluating a colleague and friend?).
Is this "normal"? This seems dishonest and sketchy, not ethical and I'm surprised it is legal to waste the external aplicants job like that ... couldn't he sue if he knew it was basically a fake job interview?