I’ve had the same frustrations with referral programs. It’s extremely frustrating to refer an amazing candidate and then have them not forwarded to the head of the line.<p>However, I’ve also experienced the other side of referral programs, where we collected referrals from people across the company for open roles. It wasn’t until I saw this side of the process that I realized that different people have completely different ideas about what referrals mean. I understood referrals as meaning the person was exemplary and that I was vouching for them. Many others understand referrals as nothing more than throwing a name of someone they casually knew one time into the queue. Others saw referrals as a type of nepotism mechanism, where they hoped they could use the system to get a friend, family member, or someone from their church (happened more frequently than I expected) pushed through the system.<p>When the referrals turn into a numbers game and the company is collecting lists of hundreds or thousands of people all the time, it stops being a system to vouch for candidates and it starts being just another system for adding people to the normal funnel. The post says something about referring “hundreds” of people, so at that scale it may have been viewed by the companies as a system for collecting potential candidates, not a system for vouching for people.<p>If you want to run a real referral system where people are expected to vouch for referrals, it takes a lot of work. You have to really drive home the point that vouching for someone means something. You also need some way to keep track of referral performance, which I know some people may dislike. However, once you’ve lost dozens of interview cycles to referral candidates who were not up to the task, you need some records to start down ranking or ignoring referrals from that employee. Likewise, someone who consistently refers good candidates should get more urgency and attention. It’s a lot of work, which is why most companies don’t bother and just treat referrals as more names in the funnel.<p>Referral bonuses make these systems even more difficult. Many people will see the potential for a referral bonus and then jam your referral pipeline up with the names of every single person they’ve ever worked with. They see it as an asymmetric bet where they lose nothing if nobody gets hired, but they might get a bonus if one of those people happens to get hired some day. You have to be really careful about what you incentivize.