system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Are professors in Europe hired mostly behind the curtains?

I asked a friend who did a PhD and a postdoc in Europe why I see so few professor jobs for my field in websites like Euraxess. He told me that based on his experience, it seemed that European professors are initially informally offered a position based on personal connection, and then they post an ad for that position exclusively on their university website just because that's a formal requirement, and then they formally hire the person they had in mind. Is this how it works most of the time?
gpt
There is no answer to this question. European countries differ vastly in hiring practices. What you describe certainly isn't true for most (or even all) of the countries with open academic systems (i.e., the ones in which a foreigner might get hired). That's places like the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. But even some of the countries with mostly closed systems have strong internal competition among candidates (e.g., Germany). What you describe might be true for some of the closed systems that suffer from nepotism; Italy struggles with that, for example.