I've worked in a company where this was the explicit hiring strategy pursued by new leadership. Two different leaders came in from two different companies (both

I've worked in a company where this was the explicit hiring strategy pursued by new leadership. Two different leaders came in from two different companies (both of which had been acquired and were now seeing a lot of turnover). In the first case, the new leadership was outside of my department but they were pressuring me as the hiring manager for a role to bring on their people, who "were known 'good' folks". When I interviewed them, the whole interviewing team agreed not to hire them because their skill set may have been good for the company they were at but a complete mismatch for the problems we had. While we didn't ultimately hire them, there was a lot of pressure and lobbying to do so. In the second case, the new leadership stepped in as head of the department/unit I was running. They took a look at the team we had and our current operating patterns, and decided that it would be faster to replace the team with new people who fit their existing operational model than to transition the existing team over to a new way of working. No one was fired, but it was a "either they fit in with the new model, they quit on their own, or they get performance-reviewed out". The new leader explicitly said that when doing rapid turnarounds, it was easier to bring in a full transplant of their former team than to figure out new patterns of leader-employee collaboration (Not unlike Twitter right now, I'd guess). While I was still a hiring manager for the role, the final approval for a candidate no longer lay with me and many of that new leader's former colleagues were hired. While they had a lot of existing patterns of working with the new leader, their skill sets were again a mismatch for the challenges our team was facing and ended up being a series of net-poor hires who received a lot of air cover from new leadership to not lose face. That's not to say that you can't have effective recommendations for hiring. Some of the best candidates I've hired have been through personal recommendations or bringing along former team members. My experience has been that this pattern is best tempered by a careful hiring process. It's a great way to put someone into the funnel and ensure they get some visibility, but it's an awful way to accelerate someone through and out of the funnel and onto a team.