Ask HN: Are job referrals worthless now?

I think it depends. My mum placed an ad in the newspaper looking for a job as a secretary and got more than 100 offers. She did not have any referrals since she was fresh out of secretary school with no prior experience. Times change.

This is so funny to read, as it just happened to me and I never have used referrals before. I literally had a glowing referral from my previous coworker who I worked with at a startup that later sold for $400 million because of work that I did directly and who is friends with a senior VP at the company I’m interviewing at but I also still had to interview with 4 other team members and do a take home test. I think the field has reached peak stupidity.

I'm not sure I've landed a job or client in the last 10 years that wasn't through a referral.

A referral means at a minimum your resume will actually get read. In most cases that’s all it means (i.e. guarantees it won’t get rejected by the ATS).

If the referrer walks it over to the hiring manager’s desk it means a lot more, but most of the time these days it just gets fed into the HR pipeline.

You might want to revisit your resume. Of course I haven’t seen it, this is free advice from some rando, and other disclaimers.

Someone referring you (with a positive hire recommendation) from inside the company is always a good thing. Someone referring you for the referral 'bonus' is not worth as much because what makes the first one good is that the person referring can explain why you would be a good fit.

That said, reputations are a thing too. All through my career I've had a mix of people who thought I was great to people who thought I was terrible. It is often a function of how and when you interacted with them, at one place I worked I discovered that a person I had worked with before was had been actively "anti-recruiting" in that they didn't want me to come work there[1]. I was fortunate in that the hiring manager took the time to get a number of opinions and look past the drama and into what really was going on, but it certainly delayed things significantly and would have resulted in a decline had they not been willing to do that digging. This only gets worse the more senior you become because you have more opportunities to be perceived as having limited someone else's career/choices/etc.

So 'referrals' in all forms are a net positive, some can be more positive than others.

That said, one of the more interesting hires I did was a guy who offered to come work for me for free for two weeks on the promise that at the end of the two weeks we'd either hire him or not. Was a bit challenging to get that through HR/Legal (but we did) and he turned out to be great. But it wasn't obvious from his CV that he was as capable as he was and he did not have anyone locally that could be a reference.

[1] I did reconcile what had happened with this person but they were completely accurate when they described me as an "asshole". I really was annoying early in my career, but that didn't become clear to me until later.