Not sure about this situation but I know my company interviews for jobs in order to get redundancy picks. Interviewed someone for a position that had already been hired for, then three weeks before they job was supposed to start the guy phoned and said he wasn’t going to continue with the company for the position. The person that was interviewed late got a call back and hired.

We hire for a short term seasonal job and people screw us over all the time by accepting the job and then continuing to look for a better one and bailing at the last minute, so we have to interview a lot of people as backup options. Had three people bail last minute this year, one of which we didn’t have enough time to re-hire for and had no backups so now we have to try and cover it on top of our normal duties which is a big strain.