> This becomes very problematic when hypergrowth companies are desperate to recruit so they start hiring friends of current employees via referral. When you hir

> This becomes very problematic when hypergrowth companies are desperate to recruit so they start hiring friends of current employees via referral. When you hire groups of people who have a history together, they tend to stick together in the new org and resist integrating into the company culture. They want to isolate themselves and operate like they did a few years back at a previous company. You end up with a lot of pockets of people trying to operate as independent teams with their own work culture. I have seen this at a company I've worked at that experienced rapid growth. The strategy they employed was Split and Absorb: first they substantially increased the size of middle management such that the manager-to-IC ratio was something like 2:1. Next each manager was given the ability to Absorb, and they had a lot of time available to them for hiring and onboarding due to the fact that they were managing maybe 3 people each. In practice I saw this start to fail almost immediately for multiple reasons. First, there began to be a cultural divide between the people who were hired organically (who were typically at the bottom of the ladder) and middle management (who were typically friends from previous jobs). There were communication breakdowns as more management discussions were being done in private channels between friends instead of with the teams. Lastly it was hard for people at the bottom to bring up concerns; even if every IC on a team agreed a problem needed to be solved, there were only 2 of you, but your manager would discuss it with their 10 friends and that made it hard for the people at the bottom to have their perspective heard in an equal light. > It takes some work to break up those cliques and fold them back in. How do you actually do this? Who at a company should be taking these steps? In theory I'm not exactly sure where it went wrong. If you're going huge amounts of time without any applicants then you can't avoid bringing in referrals, and management might even prefer for their friends to be brought into management roles due to alignment in values and culture. For the clique problem, I'm not entirely sure what an organization can do to avoid that. It's unrealistic in my opinion to assume referrals will always stay objective about everything that involves their friends, and if management has this problem then who are the Watchmen who will address that problem?