Scandals in recruitment is huge in India.
Interview panels are regularly challenged in court and sometimes overthrown and cancelled.
Some people even get their salary stopped, deducted, and fired for getting hired through illegal channels.
And not only in jobs where you stand to gain bribes, but also in jobs that are tenured from day one. Like High School teachers or elementary school teachers. Their salary is also much higher than their American counterparts when PPP is considered.
People bribe and get into all sorts of tenured posts.
People even get called to (already fixed) interviews even though their score in written test was lower than people who did not get the call.
As I said, challenging recruitment panels in court is really common.
Airtight systems can be created and are in place (e.g. in central state-owned bank recruitments) where no corruption happens. Where there is corruption it is because the people in power want it that way. The ruling parties want to recruit loyalists and their relatives in government ranks. They also have to pay high bribe, but being a member of the parties tells you whom to bribe.
Some say (I find it credible) that governments deliberately mess up recruitment procedure so they are sub-judice for a long period of time. This way, the government does not have to pay salary to them and instead use the money to many welfare projects and gain the votes of the masses.
Say, you want to give ₹10k to each HS student in your state so that they can buy smartphones. One smartphone ~5-10 votes in an election. Minium salary in peon rank ~₹40k. There are 2000 vacancies. You mess up the recruitment process deliberately, and the case goes to court. The case runs for 4 months to 5 years. If the case goes on for two years, you save ₹40k × 2000 × 24 ~ $25.6 million. And with that money, you can bankroll 192k smartphones amd get close to 500k votes- enough to swing a district (districts are sub-provinces in India).
There has been, and still are- several large scale conspiracies that manipulate results in entrance tests. People have died for investigating it. See [0].