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.
> I'm not sure how many resumes never make it past recruiting
I've asked the recruiters at my company about this (we hired roughly similar numbers). Their response was that they filter a surprising number of applicants, but they are almost always from people who are completely unqualified for the job. The referral helps fast track them through this, but it doesn't provide much more than getting their foot in the door.
"Dear Sir or Madam,
<generic blob of text>
Sincerely, <applicant name>"
If you're someone like google or in a very specific niche that I'd like to be in then I'd write a cover letter, but that is not most jobs.
Getting a good job is hard, and you can't always tell from the outside if a job is one you'd want. It doesn't take much time to show genuine interest in any opportunity that's worth applying to, no matter how prestigious the company may be.
"I wrote one of the open source packages you use!"
"You make software used in my toaster!"
"Your office it two blocks from my house!"
When I was a junior, I wrote cover letters for every job. Now that I'm senior, I haven't written one in years and get more callbacks than ever before.
Still, one could argue that flirting w/ the company a bit at the point you make a first impression, possibly in a cover letter, is in your best interests. If someone needs you, they'll offer to pay what they need to. If someone wants you, they'll pay whatever it takes to retain you. Sometimes those numbers are the same. But if a company would be willing to go the extra mile to make you happy, and you give them no reason to feel that way, you're leaving money on the table.
There's a mandatory job posting requirement to hire H1Bs - at the worksite -.
A Sunday newspaper job posting needs to happen for the green card process.
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.