This "fact-checked" "research summary" has sources that include:
- "Business Pundit. “25 Best Places to Network""
- "Undercover recruiter. “Why Employee Referrals are the Best Source of Hire”
.. and a bunch of corporate blogs.
- "Business Pundit. “25 Best Places to Network""
- "Undercover recruiter. “Why Employee Referrals are the Best Source of Hire”
.. and a bunch of corporate blogs.
Imo the article has been referenced well even if the references are mostly second hand; it repeats claims made by other articles which may also be repeating claims made by others.
To me, the key fact that I wanted to check in on was this
> Up to 70% of employees received their current company position through networking.
The reference for this probably comes from a 2017 linkedin survey[1] which polled 15,905 linkedin members in 2016 and received this as one of their answers
> ... 70 percent of people in 2016 were hired at a company where they had a connection
I find that this kind of stands at odds with the words "received their current company position *through* networking." That makes it sound like the networking was the reason they were able to get the job. The linkedin statement makes it seem like that's just how they may have found out about the job. I won't accuse the article of directly saying what I'm assuming it means. But I also think the rewording changes the meaning too much for me.
Wherever I have worked, whenever there's been a job opening I have forwarded it to friends who might be interested. For the ones who got into the job, they had a connection, but that had absolutely zero weight on whether they got hired or not. I was just a more efficient job board promoter.
Not to take away from everything in the article but I definitely would encourage people to break any numbers they find interesting down into what they might actually mean by visiting the sources and trying to read into the claims fully.
[1]: https://news.linkedin.com/2017/6/eighty-percent-of-professio...
Since it was a LinkedIn poll, it might have been interpreted as "had a connection in LinkedIn that worked at the company". Which can mean a lot of things, including being "connected" to somebody you've never even had an internet conversation with, didn't cite when applying for the job, etc.
Referrals from bad employees don't mean anything, but referrals from good employees do. All of the interview hoops that people jump through and still the most consistently reliable way to hire a good employee is to have a referral from an existing good employee.
Also, just in case it’s helpful, the zero weight statement was related to the folks I connected with. Not referrals in general.
Basically, as your comment reveals to me, there’s a lot of nuance here and the article generalizes it away into a statement that doesn’t feel accurate.
Ok. Not 100% sure of the statistical validity here.