I disagree strongly. Personal referrals are one of the most effective ways to get a job, and also one of the most effective ways to increase hiring quality. At the very least a personal reference will fast track you into an interview stage ahead of most other cold applications.
There are edge cases where a personal reference is valuable. If you’re inexperienced, it can get you an interview. Or it can get you a job at a small company without a real HR department.
But outside of that, a hiring decision made based on a personal relationship is considered cronyism. It isn’t always illegal, but most HR departments go out of their way to prevent it.
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is terrible career advice in general. It can be incredibly seductive because it promises people an advantage over competition. But it’s wrong. It’s a waste of time and in my experience, the people who follow it tend to interview poorly because they come off as arrogant and complacent.
What you're saying here sounds, to me, like the sort of thing someone who's only worked in a very narrow and constrained corporate environment would think.
Of course, if that sort of environment is all that one's interested in, then it's possibly entirely true.
It just isn't, at all, for someone like me who's not existed in that sort of environment for over twwnty years... .
Its easy to slip this past HR. The hiring manager picks the interview panel and sets expectations about the skills they should look for. These are targeted at what you already know the candidate is good at. They pass the committee due to great feedback.
