Never used indeed.com once.
But...people should know that these sites, and recruiters, are basically hiring theater. Almost all jobs (perhaps excepting FAANG meat grinder) are filled through personal connections.
This is true. Bottom-barrel* retail food service gigs don't count. (And even then... I'm certain the manager at the Gamestop I applied to at 18 binned my paper app immediately because he was hiring his friends.)
People don't like to admit it, because it calls into question the meritocratic nature of our job market. American recruitment process are fair and appropriate, not corrupt, right? Well...
*not in the skill or fortitude required, but in how the employer treates you
I don't see how personal recommendations are corrupt. If you have a known good employee, and they can attest to someone being a good fit based on previous direct experience with that person, that's a pretty strong signal. If the recommendation comes from someone not so great, or if it's more of a referral than a recommendation, you can weight it appropriately.
> Almost all jobs are filled through personal connections.
I see this repeated online, but is there any data to actually back this claim up? In my experience only a small number of jobs get filled through referrals etc.
And the sort of jobs that have a referred candidate they want to hire aren't putting up a free listing on Indeed to get 60 people send often quite good and sometimes massively overqualified CVs at the click of a button, they're putting their job ads where nobody looks and demanding they answer questions or write a cover letter explaining the appeal of $genericcompany...
I think this might be a difficult thing to get data on, as I don't think most companies would want to release this info. But I would say in my experience that the more senior the role and the more experience someone has (the author had VP-level experience) it is absolutely the case that you lean on referral networks. Even at the very senior level where people are hired through executive search firms, a big reason those firms exist is to ensure confidentiality throughout the process, but most of the names they come up with aren't usually unknown to the hiring company.
Also, it's important to understand that it doesn't need to be direct referrals (i.e. someone at the company saying "We should hire Bob X for this job"). Oftentimes it's things as simple as LinkedIn posts sharing job openings with your network, and then when that's passed around have someone reach out through a mutual contact.
Let's be honest, how many people on HN (or elsewhere) have a VP level job? Even if it is true that jobs are the very senior level are filled this way, that's a very small % of the total (in my company, much smaller than 1%).
So that still wouldn't make the claim that "most jobs are not posted/filled by referrals" true.
Nonsense, there is no way my company that is a simple mid size tech company could ever hope to fill most roles with personal connections. They try though, cash rewards for recommending someone that gets hired and passes probation.
Even with that incentive most hiring comes through a couple of in-house people that filter out the noise from the various recruiters they interact with.
Maybe with small shops < 50 poeple it might be possible.
> Almost all jobs (perhaps excepting FAANG meat grinder) are filled through personal connections.
I’ve hired roughly 10 people and all of them came in through recruiters. I don’t think my company ever considers direct applications, even though that’s an option on LinkedIn. They just never pass HR to actually arrive at the interview stage.
i don't know, where I work 100% of resumes come from a third-party recruiter, same at my previous job. I've gotten my last 3 jobs either through third-party recruiters or direct applications, not referrals.
