I think this trend we are seeing of employers offering a referral bonus to any of their Engineers who refer a candidate is the /right way/ to solve the problem.

I think this trend we are seeing of employers offering a referral bonus to any of their Engineers who refer a candidate is the /right way/ to solve the problem. Few recruiters are qualified to sort the good from the bad, and Engineers, in my experience, seem to be better at separating the 'I like this person personally' from 'I think this person is professionally skilled' than most, so I think it would be a win-win-win situation, if we could find a way to encourage that; companies would get better people, Engineers who bothered to read resumes and recommend people would get referral bonuses, and skilled people would get jobs. Now, most larger companies have referral programs in place; the question remains, how do we encourage people to use those programs? how do we facilitate that?