Trusted referrals have always been a valid approach to getting candidates in the pipeline, as long as it doesn't privilege those candidates over others who came

Trusted referrals have always been a valid approach to getting candidates in the pipeline, as long as it doesn't privilege those candidates over others who came in through other channels. However, I don't agree with waiving the technical interview. Sometimes referrers, though well-meaning, have either an outdated or incomplete idea of the candidate. Assessing a candidate's quality is quite a complicated thing, and not everyone does it well though everyone thinks they do. I say this because I've made erroneous referrals myself. It's a bias-variance tradeoff. If you trust 1-2 key people, and if they are right about a person, good, but if they are wrong they can be very wrong. Whereas if you collect more data points from independent sources, you mitigate the probability of huge errors in hiring, which can be expensive to fix. Of course there are exceptions. In a world where if Larry Page wanted to bring Jeff Dean on-board a fledgling Google because he's seen his work elsewhere and decides to waive the technical interview, then it's a different story. But I'm not sure if these exceptions abound...