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I'm calling bullshit on the "zero weight on whether they got hired or not".

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.

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I never referred them in the sense where I made a recommendation for them or mentioned that I had asked them to apply. I just pointed them to the job. The statement that they have a connection at the workplace would still be true in the cases where they were hired.

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.

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