8 ms·

85% of jobs are filled via networking

138 points by mgh2 3y ago

WheelsAtLarge 3y ago
This is especially true for jobs that are well paid and highly sought.
irrational 3y ago
I’ve sat on interview boards at a Fortune 100 company for at least 100 positions. We’ve never hired anyone based on their network. To the best of my knowledge, we’ve never even interviewed anyone that knew anybody at the company. Maybe the positions we were filling were unique.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- WheelsAtLarge 3y ago
  It might not have been a direct hire because there was a connection in the company but I bet that most of the interviewees found out about the position because they had someone in their network tell them about it and gave them tips on how to get the job.
- bnj 3y ago
  I would speculate that roles which are filled through networking never get to the posting / interview stage. If that were the case it would make sense that being involved with interview boards would lead to seeing very few candidates getting a position through their network.
  - filmgirlcw 3y ago
    Oh, this is 100% true. Or if they do have a posting, it’ll be for legal reasons only but the person they are hiring has always been planned from the beginning.
- filmgirlcw 3y ago
  Never? That’s interesting. I don’t know the hiring percentages but I would say at least 30% of the interview loops I’ve been on at a FAANG have been with someone who was referred in from a person on my team or who had another connection in. I haven’t done 100 interviews (maybe lifetime total I have, but not in tech), but it’s a solid 40 or 50. Again, the person who gets the job isn’t always someone who has a connection to the team — I would say except in rare circumstances, their chances are no better than anyone else’s — but there are usually at least two people per loop who were referred in through their network. Even in my own experience, I’ve had only one job as an adult that I didn’t have some sort of connection at or where my network wasn’t part of why I was recruited (so even if I didn’t know people hiring me personally, they knew of me). Now, my career has largely been in roles where I’m publicly visible (and that visibility is part of the job), so I won’t try to attach that to anyone else — but even for a non-public facing role, I would still leverage my network first and foremost I think. I don’t think it’s so much that knowing someone guarantees you’ll get the job, but I do think it makes it much more likely you’ll get to the first or second stage of an interview.
- hibikir 3y ago
  In general, the big advantage of going in network is the much higher chance of passing interviews vs the random person off the street that hands you their resume. I've seen this done all the time in fortune 100 companies, but it only really works if you aren't hiring so much your network is depleted. Even when the interviewing team is not aware of the reference, there's just a higher success rate, as the worst candidates just don't get recommended. Still, positions change. I've had to do full interview rounds after strong recommendations, and I've been hired by SMS in 10 minutes, salary negotiation included. One size doesn't it all.
- icedchai 3y ago
  You never had anyone at the company refer a friend or former coworker for a position there? That seems... unusual.
  - swozey 3y ago
    Huge red flag
  - 8organicbits 3y ago
    I think you'd use referrals to decide if someone should pass the first stage, as HR and resume review are a broad filter. Once you're at the interview panel, you vote based on how the interviews went. If you tell the interviewers that "this is so-and-so's friend" then you could get nepotism instead of an informed hire. I think it's possible that there were many referrals, but that information wasn't shared outside an initial screening because it was no longer helpful.
- tyingq 3y ago
  Isn't there some filtering that happens before a person is even visible to your interview board? Maybe networking was involved there?
- scarface74 3y ago
  I can guarantee you right now I could send a few emails out and tell former coworkers who are now managers or former managers who have moved on that I’m looking for a job and someone would find a position for me or worse case hire me as a consultant. I am no special snowflake but I keep my network strong.
- georgeecollins 3y ago
  Maybe the positions were a bit junior? There are some big companies that hire a lot from school, and then are up and out. It's not necessarily bad, its just a particular thing.
questime 3y ago
It's hilarious to me when HR at all corporations go on about bias, diversity etc. in recruiting and meanwhile when the corporation needs a new exec they always just find another white guy from Stanford/Ivy League.
- thijsvandien 3y ago
  This was the first thing I thought of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_KRk4q3Y44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_KRk4q3Y44
  - questime 3y ago
    This is hilarious, also basically why Chief Diversity Officer is such a degrading position. Like oh crap our executive team looks like this https://www.apple.com/leadership/ https://www.apple.com/leadership/ we need to hire a non-white person, oh but they aren't suitable for CFO etc. etc.
    - umvi 3y ago
      Greg "Joz" Joswiak
- tomrod 3y ago
  One the big banks surprised me initially, most of their leadership wasn't from Stanford/Ivy League. But most of them were McKinsey or Booz.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  Networking, and leveraging pre-existing work relationships into jobs, is not a skill that's exclusive to white guys from Stanford/Ivy League. It could be just as effective between two friends from a Step dancing group in Brooklyn who also happened to go to a coding bootcamp together.
  - jaredsohn 3y ago
    Sure - but the important part in such conversations is the contrast of what different networks give access to.
pkdpic 3y ago
Why is there not a movement within companies to stop spending so much on mass recruiting and interviewing? Doesnt it cost them thousands of dollars per candidate if they go through multiple rounds?
- throwaway2729 3y ago
  As per my CEO, it's ok to do endless interviews to find that one good candidate. It doesn't make sense to me but hey it's not my money. One of our engineering managers was complaining that they had to do 80 interviews to hire one candidate. Colossal waste of time and money. No wonder these companies are still not profitable.
  - darth_avocado 3y ago
    And that candidate leaves as soon as they find a better paying job.
  - throwaway2729 3y ago
    In 2+ years, I've done 331 interviews to hire in single digits.
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    Maybe you should buy a copy of this book [0] and subtly display it on your desk. Then hope he shows an interest to read it so you can gift it to him. [0] https://algorithmstoliveby.com/ https://algorithmstoliveby.com/
  - andersa 3y ago
    It could be your money. Money wasted doing this can't go towards your wage.
- fasthands9 3y ago
  not my expertise but a few thousand dollars seems like a pretty minor cost if you are going to end up paying them 75k a year plus benefits. the amount they spend on training will also be a few thousand. if it cost them a few thousand dollars to expand pool so they hire someone 20% better then that seems worth it.
ian0 3y ago
This "fact-checked" "research summary" has sources that include: - "Business Pundit. “25 Best Places to Network"" - "Undercover recruiter. “Why Employee Referrals are the Best Source of Hire” .. and a bunch of corporate blogs.
- badcppdev 3y ago
  A survey of our network suggests that 85% of jobs are filled via networking. Ok. Not 100% sure of the statistical validity here.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  It was checked for facts and they ensured that none made it into the final product mistakenly.
- nstart 3y ago
  Thank you! Whenever I see an extraordinarily broad claim I immediately go looking for references. Imo the article has been referenced well even if the references are mostly second hand; it repeats claims made by other articles which may also be repeating claims made by others. To me, the key fact that I wanted to check in on was this > Up to 70% of employees received their current company position through networking. The reference for this probably comes from a 2017 linkedin survey[1] which polled 15,905 linkedin members in 2016 and received this as one of their answers > ... 70 percent of people in 2016 were hired at a company where they had a connection I find that this kind of stands at odds with the words "received their current company position *through* networking." That makes it sound like the networking was the reason they were able to get the job. The linkedin statement makes it seem like that's just how they may have found out about the job. I won't accuse the article of directly saying what I'm assuming it means. But I also think the rewording changes the meaning too much for me. Wherever I have worked, whenever there's been a job opening I have forwarded it to friends who might be interested. For the ones who got into the job, they had a connection, but that had absolutely zero weight on whether they got hired or not. I was just a more efficient job board promoter. Not to take away from everything in the article but I definitely would encourage people to break any numbers they find interesting down into what they might actually mean by visiting the sources and trying to read into the claims fully. [1]: https://news.linkedin.com/2017/6/eighty-percent-of-professionals-consider-networking-important-to-career-success https://news.linkedin.com/2017/6/eighty-percent-of-professio...
willcipriano 3y ago
According to some guys informal LinkedIn survey of 3000 respondents "most of whom are in staff or management roles", had to go 3 links deep to find it. Edit: and it's "critical jobs", some term that guy came up with, not all jobs. Idiots. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-jobs-filled-via-networking-lou-adler https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-job...
oreally 3y ago
So, nepotism and not meritocracy huh?
jbm 3y ago
n=1, but I've never gotten a job without networking. It didn't matter how well I did at school, or how well I was evaluated at my previous jobs. I couldn't even get IT jobs for less than minimum wage at times, it was truly ridiculous. I spent a lot of time studying and not networking in university; my family was (and is) mostly asocial (the prototypical hard working first generation immigrant), and no one really clued me in. I didn't get that important context until years later (thank you internet) Living without a network in a foreign city, I managed to move from tiny 1000$/month contracts to consulting gigs then to a bigco. Every step was accomplished by meeting people, and solving problems, and then having them tell other people about me (and a blog article that weirdly went viral in the small space I was in). This might sound like an RPG, but it was not fun and the constant terror about missing rent was something I'm glad to have moved past. I don't recommend this at all, I'm way behind someone who got hired out of school by a friend at a BigCo. As a result, I have a lot of sympathy for people without a network and I try to evaluate them fairly when I hire people. Sadly, without a prior relationship, it's hard for the evaluator and the evaluated to really know what to make of each other. It's always going to be easier to hire someone you know or someone a friend vouches for, as you will have the ability to have trust each other from the beginning. So yeah. Tough problem. I don't have a solution.
- drBonkers 3y ago
  Do you have any resources for someone that needs to learn to and learn how to network?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - davidthewatson 3y ago
    I'm not the OP or the parent post's author; however, pre-covid I'd give the usual answer of just join meetups, attend in person, follow the gang to the neighborhood bar or coffee or wherever they go, make friends, birds of a feather, etc. Post-covid, that scene seems non-existent to me. Being an introvert, it was certainly not a game I understood intuitively, outside of the fact that the groups were so small in my city as to be harmless to someone like me with the social skills of a loner. FWIW though, every single gig I've had for twenty years was among friends-of-friends with a common thread, typically art, music, science (OS, PL, DB), or culture (motos, bikes, skateboards).
cozzyd 3y ago
TCP or UDP?
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Networks huh! Railway or Motorway? Radio or TV? Recurrent or convolutional?
Zaheer 3y ago
For the remaining 15% of you check out: https://www.levels.fyi/jobs https://www.levels.fyi/jobs
zaptheimpaler 3y ago
69% of statistics are made up
annie_muss 3y ago
My experience in job hunting (my resume is swiss cheese, full of gaps, nothing particularly impressive) matches this. Give a good presentation at a conference, go to a language meetup, chat to some engineers directly and you can often skip technical screening. Most of the times I don't even need a resume, or the resume is a formality after the decision.
x-complexity 3y ago
In a more reasonable timeline, there wouldn't be such a heavy reliance on relying upon human relationships just to survive. Familiarity biases shouldn't be used as justification for hiring someone.
madmax108 3y ago
I know this "blog" is probably hokum, but in my experience, the power of having a good network is incredible. I've been in tech for a decade, and only had a peoper whiteboard interview for my very first role, and have been able to leverage my network to get roles at some dream companies without having to go through the "invert a linkedlist"/"design a parking lot" type of interviews, with great pay raises, role hikes, and increased responsibilities. Us engineers love complaining about the interview process, but then do NOTHING to display skill outside of a resume (and trust me, the amount of lying that happens in resumes is incredible).
brundolf 3y ago
Anecdotally, I've never gotten a single offer through a cold application. I've only gotten a couple of interviews that way. Every job I've ever gotten has either been through my network, or through a recruiter or a university job fair (which are arguably network-adjacent) ...which sucks for people trying to break into the field
- blitzar 3y ago
  Anecdotally, I get replies/confirmations/hear anything at all to around 35% of applications for advertised roles. The strike rate for cold contacting people is higher.
andersa 3y ago
Knowing the right people at the right time seems almost like a super power for getting your career going. I've gotten all my jobs by referral/invitation and everyone I then tried to refer myself also ended up getting hired straight away. Now that's a totally useless sample size, but when I see people on here mention having sent hundreds of applications with no response, it just feels like I got super lucky somehow or they're doing something wrong. I started growing a small network by doing some hobby programming during uni, being pretty good at it, joining communities and being active there, helping people with their problems, etc. Purely online connections with people I never met in real life, that others kept telling me are worthless. In the end getting those connections seems to have been the most important thing I've ever done, because they reached out to me when their companies were looking to hire. A referral from the right person makes even old boundaries like being on the wrong continent meaningless. Just work remotely then, the company will figure something out... since you were recommended by someone they already trust, they're going to be far more willing to invest some extra resources.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
squokko 3y ago
In jobs where downside risk is much worse than upside risk (i.e. doing it poorly can be catastrophic, but doing it exceptionally well doesn't get you much), then it entirely makes sense to hire from trusted networks. If you're hiring for example an ombudsman for employee grievances, this person could cost your company billions of dollars if they fuck it up, but aren't going to make you any more profitable by succeeding. So the best move is to find the person with the lowest risk of fucking it up, not the person with the highest expected value.
throwaway343435 3y ago
In contrast to what most people are saying here - almost all of my jobs have been from replying to recruiting emails or applying to jobs and not via network. My first job out of college was via someone I knew from a non-tech interest (friend of several of my friends who graduated earlier) and I soon discovered that while the cultural fit was good for that non-tech interest at that time, it wasn't for me professionally. It broke some connection with my friend group and my past. I think I also like having a mental reset between jobs where I don't have to keep carrying the past with me, although maybe that will change next go around. Related - also don't like telling people i got a new job for awhile in case it doesn't work out. Was very uncomfortable.
ipaddr 3y ago
I've always stayed away from referrals. It puts additional pressure on the new job relationship working out and puts you in a more difficult spot to start. Part of your reputation is the person who referred you (good or bad). Plus it limits your circle of discovery of finding rare one of a kind jobs that are outside of your circle where most of them exist.
andrewstuart 3y ago
I don’t believe this. 20 years recruiting tells me it’s not true.
- ReDeiPirati 3y ago
  mind sharing your experience?
jeffrallen 3y ago
100% of my jobs were won by networking.
nathants 3y ago
thanks to sturgeon’s law this is a non-issue.

138 points by mgh2 3y ago

This is especially true for jobs that are well paid and highly sought.

I’ve sat on interview boards at a Fortune 100 company for at least 100 positions. We’ve never hired anyone based on their network. To the best of my knowledge, we’ve never even interviewed anyone that knew anybody at the company. Maybe the positions we were filling were unique.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
WheelsAtLarge 3y ago
It might not have been a direct hire because there was a connection in the company but I bet that most of the interviewees found out about the position because they had someone in their network tell them about it and gave them tips on how to get the job.
bnj 3y ago
I would speculate that roles which are filled through networking never get to the posting / interview stage. If that were the case it would make sense that being involved with interview boards would lead to seeing very few candidates getting a position through their network.
- filmgirlcw 3y ago
  Oh, this is 100% true. Or if they do have a posting, it’ll be for legal reasons only but the person they are hiring has always been planned from the beginning.
filmgirlcw 3y ago
Never? That’s interesting. I don’t know the hiring percentages but I would say at least 30% of the interview loops I’ve been on at a FAANG have been with someone who was referred in from a person on my team or who had another connection in. I haven’t done 100 interviews (maybe lifetime total I have, but not in tech), but it’s a solid 40 or 50. Again, the person who gets the job isn’t always someone who has a connection to the team — I would say except in rare circumstances, their chances are no better than anyone else’s — but there are usually at least two people per loop who were referred in through their network. Even in my own experience, I’ve had only one job as an adult that I didn’t have some sort of connection at or where my network wasn’t part of why I was recruited (so even if I didn’t know people hiring me personally, they knew of me). Now, my career has largely been in roles where I’m publicly visible (and that visibility is part of the job), so I won’t try to attach that to anyone else — but even for a non-public facing role, I would still leverage my network first and foremost I think. I don’t think it’s so much that knowing someone guarantees you’ll get the job, but I do think it makes it much more likely you’ll get to the first or second stage of an interview.
hibikir 3y ago
In general, the big advantage of going in network is the much higher chance of passing interviews vs the random person off the street that hands you their resume. I've seen this done all the time in fortune 100 companies, but it only really works if you aren't hiring so much your network is depleted. Even when the interviewing team is not aware of the reference, there's just a higher success rate, as the worst candidates just don't get recommended. Still, positions change. I've had to do full interview rounds after strong recommendations, and I've been hired by SMS in 10 minutes, salary negotiation included. One size doesn't it all.
icedchai 3y ago
You never had anyone at the company refer a friend or former coworker for a position there? That seems... unusual.
- swozey 3y ago
  Huge red flag
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  I think you'd use referrals to decide if someone should pass the first stage, as HR and resume review are a broad filter. Once you're at the interview panel, you vote based on how the interviews went. If you tell the interviewers that "this is so-and-so's friend" then you could get nepotism instead of an informed hire. I think it's possible that there were many referrals, but that information wasn't shared outside an initial screening because it was no longer helpful.
tyingq 3y ago
Isn't there some filtering that happens before a person is even visible to your interview board? Maybe networking was involved there?
scarface74 3y ago
I can guarantee you right now I could send a few emails out and tell former coworkers who are now managers or former managers who have moved on that I’m looking for a job and someone would find a position for me or worse case hire me as a consultant. I am no special snowflake but I keep my network strong.
georgeecollins 3y ago
Maybe the positions were a bit junior? There are some big companies that hire a lot from school, and then are up and out. It's not necessarily bad, its just a particular thing.

questime 3y ago

It's hilarious to me when HR at all corporations go on about bias, diversity etc. in recruiting and meanwhile when the corporation needs a new exec they always just find another white guy from Stanford/Ivy League.

thijsvandien 3y ago
This was the first thing I thought of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_KRk4q3Y44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_KRk4q3Y44
- questime 3y ago
  This is hilarious, also basically why Chief Diversity Officer is such a degrading position. Like oh crap our executive team looks like this https://www.apple.com/leadership/ https://www.apple.com/leadership/ we need to hire a non-white person, oh but they aren't suitable for CFO etc. etc.
  - umvi 3y ago
    Greg "Joz" Joswiak
tomrod 3y ago
One the big banks surprised me initially, most of their leadership wasn't from Stanford/Ivy League. But most of them were McKinsey or Booz.
TechBro8615 3y ago
Networking, and leveraging pre-existing work relationships into jobs, is not a skill that's exclusive to white guys from Stanford/Ivy League. It could be just as effective between two friends from a Step dancing group in Brooklyn who also happened to go to a coding bootcamp together.
- jaredsohn 3y ago
  Sure - but the important part in such conversations is the contrast of what different networks give access to.

pkdpic 3y ago

Why is there not a movement within companies to stop spending so much on mass recruiting and interviewing? Doesnt it cost them thousands of dollars per candidate if they go through multiple rounds?

throwaway2729 3y ago
As per my CEO, it's ok to do endless interviews to find that one good candidate. It doesn't make sense to me but hey it's not my money. One of our engineering managers was complaining that they had to do 80 interviews to hire one candidate. Colossal waste of time and money. No wonder these companies are still not profitable.
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  And that candidate leaves as soon as they find a better paying job.
- throwaway2729 3y ago
  In 2+ years, I've done 331 interviews to hire in single digits.
- cinntaile 3y ago
  Maybe you should buy a copy of this book [0] and subtly display it on your desk. Then hope he shows an interest to read it so you can gift it to him. [0] https://algorithmstoliveby.com/ https://algorithmstoliveby.com/
- andersa 3y ago
  It could be your money. Money wasted doing this can't go towards your wage.
fasthands9 3y ago
not my expertise but a few thousand dollars seems like a pretty minor cost if you are going to end up paying them 75k a year plus benefits. the amount they spend on training will also be a few thousand. if it cost them a few thousand dollars to expand pool so they hire someone 20% better then that seems worth it.

ian0 3y ago

This "fact-checked" "research summary" has sources that include: - "Business Pundit. “25 Best Places to Network"" - "Undercover recruiter. “Why Employee Referrals are the Best Source of Hire” .. and a bunch of corporate blogs.

badcppdev 3y ago
A survey of our network suggests that 85% of jobs are filled via networking. Ok. Not 100% sure of the statistical validity here.
willcipriano 3y ago
It was checked for facts and they ensured that none made it into the final product mistakenly.
nstart 3y ago
Thank you! Whenever I see an extraordinarily broad claim I immediately go looking for references. Imo the article has been referenced well even if the references are mostly second hand; it repeats claims made by other articles which may also be repeating claims made by others. To me, the key fact that I wanted to check in on was this > Up to 70% of employees received their current company position through networking. The reference for this probably comes from a 2017 linkedin survey[1] which polled 15,905 linkedin members in 2016 and received this as one of their answers > ... 70 percent of people in 2016 were hired at a company where they had a connection I find that this kind of stands at odds with the words "received their current company position *through* networking." That makes it sound like the networking was the reason they were able to get the job. The linkedin statement makes it seem like that's just how they may have found out about the job. I won't accuse the article of directly saying what I'm assuming it means. But I also think the rewording changes the meaning too much for me. Wherever I have worked, whenever there's been a job opening I have forwarded it to friends who might be interested. For the ones who got into the job, they had a connection, but that had absolutely zero weight on whether they got hired or not. I was just a more efficient job board promoter. Not to take away from everything in the article but I definitely would encourage people to break any numbers they find interesting down into what they might actually mean by visiting the sources and trying to read into the claims fully. [1]: https://news.linkedin.com/2017/6/eighty-percent-of-professionals-consider-networking-important-to-career-success https://news.linkedin.com/2017/6/eighty-percent-of-professio...

willcipriano 3y ago

According to some guys informal LinkedIn survey of 3000 respondents "most of whom are in staff or management roles", had to go 3 links deep to find it. Edit: and it's "critical jobs", some term that guy came up with, not all jobs. Idiots. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-jobs-filled-via-networking-lou-adler https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-job...

oreally 3y ago

So, nepotism and not meritocracy huh?

jbm 3y ago

n=1, but I've never gotten a job without networking. It didn't matter how well I did at school, or how well I was evaluated at my previous jobs. I couldn't even get IT jobs for less than minimum wage at times, it was truly ridiculous. I spent a lot of time studying and not networking in university; my family was (and is) mostly asocial (the prototypical hard working first generation immigrant), and no one really clued me in. I didn't get that important context until years later (thank you internet) Living without a network in a foreign city, I managed to move from tiny 1000$/month contracts to consulting gigs then to a bigco. Every step was accomplished by meeting people, and solving problems, and then having them tell other people about me (and a blog article that weirdly went viral in the small space I was in). This might sound like an RPG, but it was not fun and the constant terror about missing rent was something I'm glad to have moved past. I don't recommend this at all, I'm way behind someone who got hired out of school by a friend at a BigCo. As a result, I have a lot of sympathy for people without a network and I try to evaluate them fairly when I hire people. Sadly, without a prior relationship, it's hard for the evaluator and the evaluated to really know what to make of each other. It's always going to be easier to hire someone you know or someone a friend vouches for, as you will have the ability to have trust each other from the beginning. So yeah. Tough problem. I don't have a solution.

drBonkers 3y ago
Do you have any resources for someone that needs to learn to and learn how to network?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- davidthewatson 3y ago
  I'm not the OP or the parent post's author; however, pre-covid I'd give the usual answer of just join meetups, attend in person, follow the gang to the neighborhood bar or coffee or wherever they go, make friends, birds of a feather, etc. Post-covid, that scene seems non-existent to me. Being an introvert, it was certainly not a game I understood intuitively, outside of the fact that the groups were so small in my city as to be harmless to someone like me with the social skills of a loner. FWIW though, every single gig I've had for twenty years was among friends-of-friends with a common thread, typically art, music, science (OS, PL, DB), or culture (motos, bikes, skateboards).

cozzyd 3y ago

TCP or UDP?

quickthrower2 3y ago
Networks huh! Railway or Motorway? Radio or TV? Recurrent or convolutional?

Zaheer 3y ago

For the remaining 15% of you check out: https://www.levels.fyi/jobs https://www.levels.fyi/jobs

zaptheimpaler 3y ago

69% of statistics are made up

annie_muss 3y ago

My experience in job hunting (my resume is swiss cheese, full of gaps, nothing particularly impressive) matches this. Give a good presentation at a conference, go to a language meetup, chat to some engineers directly and you can often skip technical screening. Most of the times I don't even need a resume, or the resume is a formality after the decision.

x-complexity 3y ago

In a more reasonable timeline, there wouldn't be such a heavy reliance on relying upon human relationships just to survive. Familiarity biases shouldn't be used as justification for hiring someone.

madmax108 3y ago

I know this "blog" is probably hokum, but in my experience, the power of having a good network is incredible. I've been in tech for a decade, and only had a peoper whiteboard interview for my very first role, and have been able to leverage my network to get roles at some dream companies without having to go through the "invert a linkedlist"/"design a parking lot" type of interviews, with great pay raises, role hikes, and increased responsibilities. Us engineers love complaining about the interview process, but then do NOTHING to display skill outside of a resume (and trust me, the amount of lying that happens in resumes is incredible).

brundolf 3y ago

Anecdotally, I've never gotten a single offer through a cold application. I've only gotten a couple of interviews that way. Every job I've ever gotten has either been through my network, or through a recruiter or a university job fair (which are arguably network-adjacent) ...which sucks for people trying to break into the field

blitzar 3y ago
Anecdotally, I get replies/confirmations/hear anything at all to around 35% of applications for advertised roles. The strike rate for cold contacting people is higher.

andersa 3y ago

Knowing the right people at the right time seems almost like a super power for getting your career going. I've gotten all my jobs by referral/invitation and everyone I then tried to refer myself also ended up getting hired straight away. Now that's a totally useless sample size, but when I see people on here mention having sent hundreds of applications with no response, it just feels like I got super lucky somehow or they're doing something wrong. I started growing a small network by doing some hobby programming during uni, being pretty good at it, joining communities and being active there, helping people with their problems, etc. Purely online connections with people I never met in real life, that others kept telling me are worthless. In the end getting those connections seems to have been the most important thing I've ever done, because they reached out to me when their companies were looking to hire. A referral from the right person makes even old boundaries like being on the wrong continent meaningless. Just work remotely then, the company will figure something out... since you were recommended by someone they already trust, they're going to be far more willing to invest some extra resources.

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squokko 3y ago

In jobs where downside risk is much worse than upside risk (i.e. doing it poorly can be catastrophic, but doing it exceptionally well doesn't get you much), then it entirely makes sense to hire from trusted networks. If you're hiring for example an ombudsman for employee grievances, this person could cost your company billions of dollars if they fuck it up, but aren't going to make you any more profitable by succeeding. So the best move is to find the person with the lowest risk of fucking it up, not the person with the highest expected value.

throwaway343435 3y ago

In contrast to what most people are saying here - almost all of my jobs have been from replying to recruiting emails or applying to jobs and not via network. My first job out of college was via someone I knew from a non-tech interest (friend of several of my friends who graduated earlier) and I soon discovered that while the cultural fit was good for that non-tech interest at that time, it wasn't for me professionally. It broke some connection with my friend group and my past. I think I also like having a mental reset between jobs where I don't have to keep carrying the past with me, although maybe that will change next go around. Related - also don't like telling people i got a new job for awhile in case it doesn't work out. Was very uncomfortable.

ipaddr 3y ago

I've always stayed away from referrals. It puts additional pressure on the new job relationship working out and puts you in a more difficult spot to start. Part of your reputation is the person who referred you (good or bad). Plus it limits your circle of discovery of finding rare one of a kind jobs that are outside of your circle where most of them exist.

andrewstuart 3y ago

I don’t believe this. 20 years recruiting tells me it’s not true.

ReDeiPirati 3y ago
mind sharing your experience?

jeffrallen 3y ago

100% of my jobs were won by networking.

nathants 3y ago

thanks to sturgeon’s law this is a non-issue.