I Built a Bot to Apply to Thousands of Jobs at Once

Next to this, we have grown the team by moving over employees from other departments asking for internal transfers, these have about the same success rate as external applicants.

And then there are referrals from people who already work in the department (can be for people who already work for the company). The success rate on these candidates is indeed higher. I think this is because the person referring them has already thought about whether the person referred is a fit or not. We give them the same interview process, and don't always tell the interviewer that the candidate is a referral.

That said, I see 3 things that might push the reality closer to what you said "most jobs are filled through referrals".:

1. If you're hiring only a few people, the statistics will probably bias towards referrals. It is easy to get a few referrals for a specific position if you need them.

2. Referrals might end up on the desk of the hiring manager earlier (e.g. from employee to hiring manager) compared to an official application (webform to recruiting to manager). Sometimes we can close a position before the first resumes from recruiting even land on my desk.

3. As jobs get more senior, a hiring mistake becomes more expensive, and in that sense hiring a strong referral is on average going to reduce this risk. So, for higher level jobs I think indeed that many are filled through networking or targeted reach-outs rather than open applications.

Unfortunately even that oversimplifies the actual situation - there is not one type of job and there is not one type of organisation hiring.

The higher up the ladder you go the less likely it becomes that you would get a job based on your resume / skills alone. You will need an endorsement of some kind that might come from inside the company or through a trusted external referrer (e.g. a specialised senior / executive placement agency aka head hunter used by the company for pre-selecting candidates - sometimes this is visible when the agency is advertising the role, sometimes not when the role is advertised under the company name).

Many of these roles are still advertised like other roles mainly to follow process - advertising every vacancy to the public is almost always a step to tick off in hiring processes.

While some companies - mostly fast growing or start-ups - are more open to "outsiders", in others the public advertising while still providing some transparency has long become a complete illusion.

My most extreme examples here would be with government agencies for permanent senior or above roles. This can be best demonstrated with United Nations post advertising.

The UN has a series of job boards where the public can apply to any of the jobs and all posts vacant should be on these (not sure if they still include the most senior ones - you normally find these in the Economist).

What they don't tell you is that a lot of them only take internal candidates and are not really open to external applicants - this can go that far that even staff members from other UN agencies wont through the first selection round when applying.

Other (non-professional) jobs might only be filled locally, e.g. if you would be in the UK and the job is in Switzerland don't bother...

After that, applying for senior posts when you are not "part of the system" is a completely useless endeavour. Here even skills seem to become secondary - with most of them you will have to be endorsed by your government. There might be a very small number of people that made it onto senior posts in the last 10-15 years without government endorsement, but tmk all of them had very strong internal / organisation support behind them. And most of them had an enormously hard time to fight off the "cronies" after they got the post - no surprise that even less survived the first 2 years.

Overall, job boards might be a good starting point for entry level positions or contract work. It helps you to identify potential opportunities, but there is normally no direct road to get a job from the advert alone.

Often you have a better chance to apply directly on the company web sites, or on sites like Kaggle or HackerRank.

Most importantly you need to find a way to stick out from the crowd.

Banks hire knowledge workers/creative types/snowflakes.

In fact, they hire the absolute best-credentialed and most-experienced in the market. Our receptionists, mail and facilities staff at minimum had a Masters degree, went to a Tier 1 school and did something very interesting/exceptional with their off-time.

They just try to turn them into drones via compensation schemes and internal politics.

Good candidates should get offers quickly.

Thus, the best way to get a good job is to be there the moment it's posted (or even better, before)

The dual is true for candidates, too.

You can't start networking if your baseline of knowing anyone is 0. For example, I know of 0 people in the finance industry. The barrier to entry for me to start networking in it is orders of magnitude higher than sending out cold applications online.

This is additionally compounded that networking is extremely dependent on factors entirely unrelated to your actual skills: attractiveness, charisma, social skills, class signaling, quite possibly race and sex.

And you wonder why people don't "just network!".

Of course, there's also the matter that if you keep it up, your name is going to be instantly associated with application spam and probably blacklisted.