Companies I have worked for where there has been implicit (and sometimes even explicit) overestimation of staffing needs when requesting extra people to counter the fact that the entire hiring round will not complete before the inevitable next hiring freeze.
I'm not talking the large scale stuff like Meta assuming the metaverse was a trend that would require their company to grow 50%, but the medium scale stuff like a department in a 1000 person company putting in to hire 12 people instead of 8, etc.
Oh, you mean "promoting over hiring" as in "encouraging over-hiring", and not "promoting employees into positions that would otherwise be new hires"?
Of everyone I’ve managed (surely 50+ managers by now), I can only think of one who was heavily biased towards under-hiring. Most were biased towards over-hiring (some strongly so) and that’s the makeup of most companies’ middle management ranks. Many identified (often correctly) that the more people they had in their org, the more important they were. (Some leveling guidelines even make this explicit.) Add periodic freezes to the mix and this gets amplified during the “open season” times.
Every place I’ve worked I’ve heard things like “you better hire someone for that req before it goes away”, “if you think you need 4, ask for 6”, “make sure you don’t lose that backfill”.
Where are these companies you speak of?