I have never had to seek work. It has always been from people I knew or people who knew my coworkers. If one has good skills, the work will speak for itself and lots of repeat business/new customers will come knocking on the door.
To counter this, my experiment at the moment is in freelancing at moonlight, but where the client is non-technical and so getting a non-tech to non-tech referral means the client couldn't whiteboard me* if they wanted to, no more than I can white board my dentist. They will base their decision on the trust of the referral, and the fact they can try me out first / easily fire me anyway.
My question to you, is what sort of companies let you skip the hoop jumps? Would Google / Netflix etc allow this, or are they too standardized? I can see a startup allowing this or even needing it as an early employee is much more than just an algo remembering machine. What about a medium size co?
* I just noticed how similar "whiteboarding" and "waterboarding" sound. :-/
Hard question as I did not apply to many, but the largest offer I had was a company with some 150k+ people and I could just go in and start. I knew the CTO from a project in another company (he was the CTO there and we were contractors); the project failed but we kept in touch. I find (my prejudice) that kind of scale very much not interesting to work for; I like companies < 500 people.
For Google/Netflix(/Facebook/...) I definitely cannot answer as I never wanted to work for those companies and my network is local so I am nothing to them. In working for a very-large-company I think I would only consider microsoft research as I really love what they are doing [0] (and would work there almost for free), but like said, my network is far more local.