It's official - referrals are useless when applying for jobs
Thanks to the massive number of people who have been laid off over the past year, unless you have a direct connection to the hiring manager themselves, referrals don't do much to get an interview anywhere. While it might get an additional glance by someone in HR, it simply postpones your rejection for a day or two until you get rejected. A friend of mine with over 20 yesrs of proven product marketing leadership experience in multiple industries has been referred to multiple roles at companies like NVIDIA, Databricks, Qualtrics, and Quickbase only to get rejected by their HR departments who are too clueless to understand they are rejecting the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. Is it because she is too old and there companies would rather hire younger, less experienced individuals for those opportunities (its definitely not about the $$$), or are these companies so out of touch with what they truly need so they would rather not hire anyone at all and set themselves back 6-12 months until they might find the right candidate for their opening. Please help me prove that referrals mean something. DM me for her contact details. Thanks!
One cannot draw broad conclusions based on personal experience.
I absolutely can, but my comments aren't just from that friend. It came from many others at the Director, VP and C-level.
mass layoffs mostly affected under performers and no one wants a risk of bad hires. I referred multiple people to Databricks and all but one got a chance to interview
DM for Raytheon
I'll let her know.
Referrals get you the attention, doesn’t guarantee they will select you if you’re not a match… I don’t know if age is directly an issue but if YOE doesn’t align with the leveling of the role, that could be a deterrent - though not a deal breaker.
In my opinion, if you get a referral, you should have an HR conversation at the very least.
Why do you feel entitled to that conversation just because of a referral, especially if HM doesn’t think you’re a match? That would be thousands of unnecessary reach outs for HR which is overhead. You’re already getting an advantage over other applicants.
Or HMs are clueless / ridiculously selective, like in the case of my friend.
Uh, we have a hiring freeze. They are too brain dead to know that?
Uh, this happened months ago. She had referrals to multiple positions that were open, and she still got rejected.
Uh, we have had a hiring freeze for months?
"Official" - proceeds to use an anecdote as evidence
I trust my friend more than the average poster on here who claims to work 10h/week and makes a sizeable TC.
Incorrect. I’ve had plenty of people hired through my referrals. In fact, anyone reading can DM for a referral to TikTok / Bytedance
For every 10 people hired through referrals, there are 100s that got rejected at the resume level.
@amazon what’s your point? When there’s a job opening, typically they are just looking for one person to fill the role. Therefore all other applicants will get rejected. You do know that’s how it works, right? That doesn’t mean referrals “don’t work”.