Don't ask me to embarrass myself

I’ve had the same frustrations with referral programs. It’s extremely frustrating to refer an amazing candidate and then have them not forwarded to the head of the line.

However, I’ve also experienced the other side of referral programs, where we collected referrals from people across the company for open roles. It wasn’t until I saw this side of the process that I realized that different people have completely different ideas about what referrals mean. I understood referrals as meaning the person was exemplary and that I was vouching for them. Many others understand referrals as nothing more than throwing a name of someone they casually knew one time into the queue. Others saw referrals as a type of nepotism mechanism, where they hoped they could use the system to get a friend, family member, or someone from their church (happened more frequently than I expected) pushed through the system.

When the referrals turn into a numbers game and the company is collecting lists of hundreds or thousands of people all the time, it stops being a system to vouch for candidates and it starts being just another system for adding people to the normal funnel. The post says something about referring “hundreds” of people, so at that scale it may have been viewed by the companies as a system for collecting potential candidates, not a system for vouching for people.

If you want to run a real referral system where people are expected to vouch for referrals, it takes a lot of work. You have to really drive home the point that vouching for someone means something. You also need some way to keep track of referral performance, which I know some people may dislike. However, once you’ve lost dozens of interview cycles to referral candidates who were not up to the task, you need some records to start down ranking or ignoring referrals from that employee. Likewise, someone who consistently refers good candidates should get more urgency and attention. It’s a lot of work, which is why most companies don’t bother and just treat referrals as more names in the funnel.

Referral bonuses make these systems even more difficult. Many people will see the potential for a referral bonus and then jam your referral pipeline up with the names of every single person they’ve ever worked with. They see it as an asymmetric bet where they lose nothing if nobody gets hired, but they might get a bonus if one of those people happens to get hired some day. You have to be really careful about what you incentivize.

I had the same experience with referrals until I realized that the whole system is more corrupted than a public system clerk in third world country. Rules are for suckers and about as true to the letter as democracy in China.

What you need is get under the skin of your manager. Then there's no limit for unadvertised "talent" hiring.

I used to work for a guy who was the exact opposite of the shock absorber, "crap umbrella" who can make for a good boss. Instead, this was the guy who was mixing up the Flavor Aid at Jonestown. I recall a bit where he was relaying how the organization was rolling out a new performance metric, and it was a full-on "Ratings of a full five out of five technically exist; you will never get a five, but you should strive for five and behave as if it were attainable" with a straight face and acted as if this were reasonable, not risible.

Similarly, I felt like I was being asked to try for that football.

At this point, I consider every performance review and self-evaluation to be an elaborate and shameful Kabuki routine I must execute while various entities in some star chamber play craps with my future.

I wonder what happened with those patents. Could a company license them to patent trolls? Otherwise, I don't understand the purpose of spending a lot of resources to come up with a bunch of bs patents.

> but my lived experience tells me these systems are all too human-driven to reliably work

always-has-been.jpg

The good news is that if you are good with people then the systems work very well!

"Whenever I hear a boomer raving about how back in their day, you’d stay at a job for your entire life and earn a gold watch and a pension and the respect of your ancestors, ..."

Back in the boomer's day? You're talking about this boomer's grandfathers' day.