In another startup, management asked every IC on hiring teams to find at least one potential candidates - every week. Time to find them was allocated into sprints. The referral bonus was raised from 2k to 3k.
The first example was more successful from what I remember.
Especially at a larger company where the hiring process can be a little obscured from the actual team. Where not every, or even most engineers on a team get to meet a new engineer before they're hired.
These systemic problems that are only tangential to actual work rarely occur but the common mitigations seem to put a lot of pressure on everyday man, maybe even more than the problem itself... I wonder what's the "correct" solution here.
And I don't even mean racism - say your potential candidate is older with kids (assuming you're younger) would you pass them because they cannot go out drinking with you after work (a.k.a social circle)?
That said, I agree that you want to work with people you get along with, but it has to be at work. Social circle is the issue for me.
This is, and has always been, a real problem: That your ability to get good positions is limited not by your skill set but by your ability to network.
2. The notion that companies will win purely due to skill is questionable. I would highly recommend listening to "How I Built This". Skill is a significant factor, but companies that win do not always do so based on skill.
Anecdotally, some of the best engineers I've worked with despise the networking culture and prefer to keep to themselves, while some of the most "social" and "networking" people were grifters who didn't have much skill, but knew how to appear like they do.
Not really. In my experience that is the exception rather than the rule. Especially because most people will have no way to know you have good skills if they don't already know you.