Do the routine work visibly well and the recommendation happens years later without you asking.
I think the hiring industry has made a mess of this, and job seekers are paying for it. People spend months polishing applications that a screening program skims and discards, while the thing that gets people hired is sitting in their old projects, unasked for. Hardly anyone tells them, because a whole business depends on selling them one more resume rewrite.
How do people get senior technology jobs?
Somebody who has watched them work says their name in a room they’re not in.
Anthony Markey said almost the same thing when he came on Leaders and Their Stories: “The more people that are going to have conversations about you in rooms you’re not in, the better it is for your business.” He’d know. He says nearly all of his business came from relationships.
That’s been true for a long time and it’s become more true, because every other channel has degraded. Application volume has exploded now that submitting takes seconds. Candidates generate resumes. Employers automate the screening and candidates work around it. 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’s still expensive to fake. Which means the useful career question is who has seen your work closely enough to describe it.
I find that encouraging. The one signal automation can’t counterfeit is somebody who watched you handle a bad night and still remembers it.
What does a managed services client notice about you?
Everything, over a long enough period, and none of it in a formal review.
The one signal automation can’t counterfeit is somebody who watched you handle a bad night and still remembers it.
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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t building a network and they weren’t 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.
Anybody can perform for an hour, and nobody can keep up a performance through years of ordinary mornings. I trust that kind of evaluation more than any interview I ever sat through or ran.
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 think about. 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 all of it here. Nothing about that is about my cleverness. The reason he gives is that I understood what they needed. Any competent person can do that, and most don’t bother.
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. That was its own conversation. They hired me on the spot as director of technical services. That job lasted twenty years.
No application and no resume: a client who watched the work did the recommending.
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.
I think hiring managers who lean on interview performance are shortchanging themselves and the candidates both. The quiet, reliable people lose to the confident talkers, and the company finds out which kind it hired when it’s too late to matter.
Which is why the referral shortcut works from both directions. If you’re hiring, the highest-value question you can ask your network is who they’ve watched work. If you want to be hired, the highest-value thing you can do is give somebody a real answer to that question.
| Attribute | Application | Referral |
|---|---|---|
| What it tells a hiring manager | What somebody claims to have done | How they behave over time and under pressure |
| Who supplies it | The candidate | Somebody who watched them work |
| How hard to fake | Cheap: generated resumes, automated screening | One of the few signals still expensive to fake |
| What it rests on | A performance anybody can keep up for an hour | Years of ordinary mornings and bad nights |
| Who it tends to favor | Confident talkers | Quiet, reliable people |
| Best move for the job seeker | Polishing yet another resume | Doing routine work visibly well and staying reachable |
How do you build a referral network without networking?
Do the work and be findable. That’s most of it.
Deliberate networking has a poor reputation for a reason. Somebody you met once at an event can’t describe how you handle a failure at two in the morning, so their recommendation carries almost nothing.
I can’t stand the networking advice that treats people as contacts to collect. It burns time that could go into work somebody would remember, and it leaves you with a list of names who couldn’t vouch for you if they were asked. The people who can describe that are the ones you’ve worked alongside. Vendors, clients, contractors, the counterpart at the company you integrate with. Those relationships form as a byproduct of doing a job. That 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, not as performance but because the thing being evaluated is reliability, and reliability is only visible over time.
My take
Your next job is being decided by the people you’re working for this week. Mine came from doing unglamorous maintenance well for a client who recommended me, and it lasted twenty years. No application, no resume. Forget networking events. Do the boring work properly for the people in your building, because they’re watching how you behave when nobody’s assessing you. A referral tells the next employer how you act on an ordinary Tuesday, and no interview can show them that.
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’s 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 wasn’t being evaluated. I was just doing the work, and somebody was in a position to notice.
Career advice, to my mind, gets this wrong more than anything else. It tells people to sell themselves harder, when what worked for me was a client who could describe exactly how I behaved when their systems failed. Do that work well for the people in front of you and make sure they can find you later, because they’re the ones whose word carries.
This book starts on a Friday night at Trader Joe’s when the primary system failed. It is about building relationships that hold, written by an introvert who once had nobody to call.
