Strong referrals almost always leads to a job that your network can place you in. You might have limited options for companies and teams, based on who is in your network. If the job market is abundant then having a strong referral is less valuable, but is often the best path to more senior positions. If the job market is not abundant then a job referral might be a way to be placed in a position in weeks instead of months.
I keep hearing about these "network placed" jobs on HN, but in 25 years, I've never seen it myself. I keep good relationships with former co-workers, we maintain group chats for each of my previous companies where we keep each other up on our careers. I even went to barbecues hosted by a former manager, until he moved out of the Bay Area. None of these have ever actually materialized into a job. It just doesn't work that way. We're all entry level worker bees and don't have any way to put our thumb on the scale at our own companies. If someone in my network reaches out to me asking for help with getting a job at MyCompany, the best I can do is review his resume, coach him on interviews, and then ultimately point him to the link in the job board, where 90% chance he will be ghosted.
Where are these companies where I can tell my boss "Hey, Mike is a good programmer and he just applied. Just give him the job without interviewing! Or accelerate him through the process!" I suppose if it were a two person startup where it was me and my boss you could do that, but at a normal 1000 person CRUD shop with dedicated HR machinery? No way.
On the flip side I’ve worked in 4 companies over 12 years and 2/4 were jobs that I got because I knew someone. The other two, a significant cohort of the people who worked there knew each other from previous workplaces.
Nobody is getting jobs without any interviews, but people are absolutely getting interviewed before/without a job listing, or starting the initial screen with recruiter/hiring manager with an upper hand of “Mike said you’re good to work with”. Even at a 1000 person company with HR.
>> I keep hearing about these "network placed" jobs on HN, but in 25 years, I've never seen it myself.
Same here, also =~ 25 years (working as a professional programmer since 2001). I never had a problem finding a job myself (either switching jobs or being laid off, it happens) but it was always "cold calling", apply on a job board / Linked In and go through the interview without any referral or inside help.
And when I tried to refer someone, they were blissfully ignored. Even had managers / HR go after me: "we need someone ASAP, don't you have some referrals?". Reached my acquaintances among former workmates, convinced them to make a personalized CV so I can send it to HR, nothing happened next. They didn't even call the guy, completely "forget about it".
So I learned my lesson of corporate helplessness and don't give a fuck anymore. Don't recommend anyone, don't care if HR or managers need someone urgently, I do my job and don't get involved with anyone else anymore.
Yup, another similar situation here - ~20 years in Bay Area, almost 15 years at one company, no one in my "network" said anything about jobs. I did contact a few directly and "not hiring right now". A bunch of others (since I was one of the younger ones at this company when I joined in '08) had since retired.
Got a new job through a LinkedIn ad, found a former co-worker here.
I mean, it could be that I'm not a great networking person, but.. I'll agree that network hasn't helped me much so far.
You're going to need to pitch your buddies a lot more aggressively than that.
You've worked closely with Mike in the past at ExampleCorp, where he was one of the team's top contributors. He was great at code reviewing, a calm and reliable voice during production incidents, and always ready to help out new graduates. Mike was the guy people turned to with their most difficult WidgetStack bugs, fixing problems that had stumped other developers. He would be a great asset to the company, and a great fit for this role - which you note needs WidgetStack. He has your strongest possible recommendation.
That's not how it works. What happens is an organization decides to hire for some reason, now has the problem that good candidates are hard to find. So people say "well I know this guy who I worked with at xxx that's looking for a job".
I'll give you a couple of examples I've been involved with:
1. I was applying for a job at Company A and I had a former co-worker working there. I think it was down to me and 2 other people and the manager asked my former co-worker about me and I believe his feedback tipped the scales in my favor.
2. Same situation as above but in this case it was my feedback. A different former co-worker was applying for a job at Company A(now that I was working there) and the manager hiring asked both me and my former and now present co-worker about the candidate as it was between him and another person.
3. A former manager straight up offered me a position at his new job because I'd be a good fit for the role as they were building exactly what I had done before. I turned him down(nicely) as I had stepped away from that particular type of work.
4. I've given negative feedback on a candidate that I'd worked with that was interviewing for an open role but it wasn't just me. All 3 of us including co-workers from (1) and (2) above had previously worked with the candidate and we didn't think he'd be a good fit for our org but it was ultimately up the manager of the team that was hiring to make the decision.
Granted I'm at a smaller company but these "network placed" jobs do happen. Sometimes it's just tipping the scales and sometimes it's a straight up job and sometimes it could be the reason you didn't get the job.
My first job was a student worker at my school district in Information Services. Got that because my physics teacher put in a word for me (and I interviewed ok).
My first 'real job' out of college was a 'noc techician' at a company a good friend was working at. Although that wasn't a great use of my skills, at least it got me started, and I think there was a chance of moving towards development, eventually.
Next job was through a niche job board.
Since then, I've been hired my original skip level boss from that job twice.
Job interviews are a lot different when they are trying to convince you to join, vs you trying to convince them to let you.
Making an impression on someone who has opportunities for you later can work out well.
I've also had a couple other people reach out for what I think would have been a similarly easy interview for me, but one of them I didn't want to work with again, and the other one, the company location and business wasn't a good fit for me.
Most developers don't work in giant companies, but the programmers who do work in giant companies mostly don't know many programmers who work in the medium-sized companies where most of the jobs are right now.
If you are interested in diversifying your network, you can purposefully choose a job at a different scale of company when you are next looking, but you can also start going to conferences or user groups or get involved with an interesting open-source project.
Not every piece of networking has to be with coworkers. Not putting all your networking eggs into one basket can give you options, especially as the layoffs are flying fast and furious.
Well, there's also a difference between liking someone and liking to work with them. I've had a lot of coworkers I liked that I wouldn't bend over backwards to hire. That said, this process might not work at Google or what have you.
I've never worked in a company so large that I couldn't go a step further and actually talk to the hiring manager and tell them they would be stupid not to take someone's resume seriously. But it's more about fast tracking the interview than skipping it. No one is just going to blindly hire referrals. They shouldn't anyway.
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. There’s a great bit in Margin Call about this: Kevin Spacey’s character challenges the plan to sell the firm’s entire MBS portfolio with the point that once their counterparties figure out they’ve been sold a bag, they will never trust them again. The firm insists on the plan anyway, so when Spacey tells his floor the news, he acknowledges that this will be the end of many of their careers, and as compensation the firm is giving each trader a $2m bonus for selling through their slice of the portfolio. They’re basically giving them an advance in exchange for making themselves unhireable, because ultimately the economy is made of people working with other people.
If you can get as good a signal on someone's performance in 5 hours of interviews as you can in five months of working with them, either you are a genius or you are not paying attention at work.
The better someone is at their job, the less I think of what they are doing at work, because they make my problems disappear, so I can actually think of the things that matter to me (e.g. my family/friends and hobbies).
An interview is a process targeted specifically at evaluating performance of a candidate.
If you have time to pay attention to 100 other people at work and think about their performance - you either have a super easy job where you can slack, or should focus more on improving your own work.
Strong referrals may lead to interviews at larger companies. But rarely jobs. You still have to go through the interview process and most of the time how you came in isn’t even known to the interviewer.
Now if your network includes directors and CxOs who can just push a job through specifically for you, that’s different. Especially if it is a strategic hire for them. Those types of jobs usually don’t involve formal interviews and they are more of discussions about mutual fit.
An internal referral by someone at the company you are applying to might carry some weight, or at least get you a foot in the door (interview), but I think it's been years/decades since past employers were willing to say more than "yes, he worked here", for fear of lawsuits.
References these days are usually with individual coworkers, rather than a company reference.
It usually isn't "is this person a good developer?" either. Instead, it is open-ended questions without any one right answer. How much structure did this person like? What about your work place helped them be successful? What role did they play on the project you worked on together? What impact did they have on the team?
If someone's reference didn't work with them closely, that's as strong a no-hire signal as if they outright said "this person sucked." If they don't have anyone they can hand you the phone number for who has specific, detailed praise about them and their work, you can safely move on to the ten other candidates who do.
> good referrals are really the only way to definitely get the job
Yeah, no. They're one factor in many. I've managed just fine throughout almost 4 decades of career without referrals.
I'm fairly OK with how that career turned out.
It has drawbacks. Some of my jobs were odd kinks in the career curve - though I did enjoy them. (Roughly, ESA -> Industrial Automation -> Consulting -> Startup -> Video Games -> FAANG. It is not the straightest path :)
Referrals are definitely a large plus (IIRC, the industry stats say about 1/3rd of job offers are internal referrals, even though they are far from 1/3 of the candidates).
