Another anecdotal... I originally got rejected from my current position. It wasn't until a month later that they called me back and we're like, "um yeah, actually come back and let's talk about compensation." Found out that some political hurdles were cleared up for the extra headcount needed to bring me on. Apparently the whole interviewing candidates process was started a bit earlier than it should have.
At one job, I was hired pretty quickly after a couple of interviews. About a month after I started, another developer left, and they went thru the queue of people they had interviewed at the same time I did, and hired one of them. In that case turned out it was a guy I knew.
So instead of posting a new req, when they had just gone through a bunch of interviews, they hired someone from the previous round, since it was fairly recent.
Similarly, at my current position, I interviewed and was hired. After I arrived I found that I had to do some weird paperwork each pay period, but I didn't know much about the internal organization so just did what I was told. A few months later, my supervisor told me, "When we hired you, the budget for your position wasn't approved. We were hoping we could scrap together enough funding to pay for you until we could convince management to approve funding as a permanent position."
