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Ask HN: People involved in hiring: are hires via referrals more frequent?

1 points by toexitthedonut ↗ HN
I'm asking in terms of your own personal, anecdotal experience with being in the hiring process. Is the hiring model at your company more effective when referrals are used?

As someone who has no friends/contacts that know me well enough to refer me in a professional capacity, I am almost sure that I'm already at a big disadvantage when it comes to applying for jobs. So I'm curious as to how often jobs are filled via referrals and not, from personal and anecdotal experiences.

6 comments

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smt88
I understand the situation you're in. People always say that if the first person you talk to is in HR, you're already screwed. Or another version: if you just submit a resume through an online platform, you're screwed.

I haven't done it myself, but I've seen friends break free of this. The best, most difficult, most time-consuming way is, of course, to meet lots of people. You never know who has a connection where. Opportunities come from surprising places.

A much quicker hack is to send messages on LinkedIn. Find the person who would be your boss at the company, tell them how much you like the company/product, and ask them if you can buy them lunch and learn more about their team.

In some cities/cultures, like NYC, this almost never works. People are really busy. In other places, I've seen success rates as high as 10%. Of these, around 25% seem to result in offers (assuming the person is qualified for the job). That's not bad!

In general, it's (unfortunately) going to take a lot of footwork and rejection.

toexitthedonut
>The best, most difficult, most time-consuming way is, of course, to meet lots of people.

It really is true that networking is a high cost (in time) but high payoff approach. That is also why, when time is of the essence, networking is not a realistic option.

The longer you go without a job, the faster you want to get hired. But networking, you can't rush that. I know at least that much.

That's mostly why I posted this question- to at least get some rough idea of how much of my competition is entering "cold". I've talked to people on LinkedIn, where I'm from (Chicago) I talk to people in the immediate area. They don't answer back much, they probably have busy lives, but I wear my job search on my sleeve.

smt88
Can you search in other areas? Places like Nashville, Raleigh, Atlanta, Austin, and even Canada tend to have more open, laid-back business cultures than NYC, Chicago, and the Bay. I've found that in the "B" cities, you can often get time even from executives of fairly large companies. (The pay-to-cost-of-living ratios tend to be higher, too!)
toexitthedonut
I'm bullish to Austin. Also into the Denver/Boulder, CO area. Of course, paid relocation needs to exist but those that do tend to be the better companies already.
tedmiston
At early stage startups it happens a lot for the sake of time or just having worked with someone before if nothing else.

I wouldn't necessarily be discouraged by it as a lot of referrals are nothing more than "I met this person at meetups a couple times" which doesn't give them much of an advantage in the interview process — if anything it's a minor factor most of the time. The real leg up that these people have is knowing of new positions early or possibly before they're posted.

The best thing you can do is network yourself and attend events where the people you want to work with go.

If you are less social, you can find other ways to break into the scene like submitting pull requests and contributing code to projects that people in your field care about. Writing blog posts about the tech too. That kinda stuff doesn't go unnoticed.

jrnichols
It depends on the type of job, but in my experience, "who you know" really can take you a lot farther than "what you know." You can always learn new skills and things, but sometimes a good corporate fit is more difficult to gauge from a resume.