Do the routine work visibly well and the recommendation happens years later without you asking.
How do people get senior technology jobs?
Somebody who has watched them work says their name in a room they are not in.
That has been true for a long time and it has become more true, because every other channel has degraded. Application volume has exploded now that submitting takes seconds. Resumes are generated. Screening is automated on one side and worked around on the other.
When the written signals stop carrying information, the spoken ones carry more. A recommendation from somebody with firsthand knowledge is one of the few pieces of evidence that is still expensive to fake.
Which means the useful career question is not how to write a better resume. It is who has seen your work closely enough to describe it.
What does a managed services client notice about you?
Everything, over a long enough period, and none of it in a formal review.
At the consulting firm where I spent the late 1980s and early 1990s, part of my job was managing our managed services clients. One of them was a company called US Growers.
The work was not glamorous. Keep their computers going. When something failed, fix it. When they needed an upgrade, handle it. Me and my team, on a normal schedule, for years.
Nobody was auditioning. I was not building a network and they were not evaluating me for anything. They had systems that needed to run and I ran them.
What that produces over several years is a group of people who know exactly how you work. Not how you describe yourself. How you behave when something breaks at an inconvenient time.
What did the work look like from the client side?
Ralph Newton worked at US Growers during that period, and years later he wrote it down.
He describes developing custom applications to update their warehouse management system so it would work with their largest customer. He calls the work dedicated and reliable, and he singles out understanding their needs as the thing that mattered.
Then the line I still find remarkable. He wrote that the applications had worked so well that many of the programs they were running at the time of writing were updated versions of the same ones.
That was written in 2015, about work done many years earlier. You can read the whole thing here.
Nothing about that is about my cleverness. The reason he gives is that I understood what they needed, which is the part any competent person can do and most do not bother with.
Can you be interviewed without knowing it?
Yes, and the most important interviews of my career worked that way.
US Growers recommended me to the vice president of MIS at a major national retailer. He started bringing me in to talk. Several times, across a stretch of weeks.
I had no idea he was looking for a hire. I thought we were having conversations, so I behaved like somebody having conversations, which in hindsight is the best possible preparation.
Eventually there was a formal interview. I dressed up for that one. He liked me and then had to sell me to the president of the company, which was its own conversation.
They hired me on the spot as director of technical services. That job lasted twenty years.
Why do referrals outperform applications?
Because a referral answers a question an application cannot.
An application tells a hiring manager what somebody claims to have done. A referral from a person who watched them tells the hiring manager how they behave over time, under pressure, when nobody was assessing them.
Behavior over time is what every hiring manager is trying to buy, and no interview format reliably produces it.
Which is why the referral shortcut works from both directions. If you are hiring, the highest-value question you can ask your network is who they have watched work. If you want to be hired, the highest-value thing you can do is give somebody a real answer to that question.
How do you build a referral network without networking?
Do the work and be findable. That is most of it.
Deliberate networking has a poor reputation for a reason. Somebody you met once at an event cannot describe how you handle a failure at two in the morning, so their recommendation carries almost nothing.
The people who can describe that are the ones you have worked alongside. Vendors, clients, contractors, the counterpart at the company you integrate with. Those relationships form as a byproduct of doing a job, which means they cost nothing extra.
Two things make them useful later. Stay reachable, since a recommendation requires somebody to find you. And do the unglamorous work visibly rather than quietly, not as performance but because the thing being evaluated is reliability, and reliability is only visible over time.
Does old work still generate opportunities?
Longer than anyone expects.
Ralph wrote his account decades after the work. The people who recommended me are gone now, and both the vice president who hired me and the president who approved it have passed away.
The systems outlasted them and the reputation outlasted the systems. That is the mechanism nobody plans for and everybody benefits from.
Twenty years of my career came from keeping a client’s computers running well, at a job where nobody told me I was being evaluated, because I was not being evaluated. I was just doing the work, and somebody was in a position to notice.
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