@criver
For all you know he " took" the place of somebody more talented and more suited to the job, just because the HR would be biased after the recommendation.
For all we know, he may very well be that "somebody", but since his CV isn't quite what HR is looking for, he never got the job despite being the perfect fit for it.
Let me explain to you how these things work.
Most of the time, it's not HR that recruits people. It's the boss of whichever department needs new workers who does.
When I need more employees, I write a job description, and send it to HR. HR works their magic (newspaper, internet, whatever), and receives applications from potential new hires.
And since I've got more important things to do than reading CVs all day long, HR also filters and forwards me the resumé of any they think are worth my time.
The problem is: HR isn't me. They don't know what kind of people I need. All they know is what I wrote in the job description, and I can't be too technical about that.
If I ask for someone who's "good at writing code", HR has no idea what to do with that. They're not IT. It's
my job to judge who is or isn't competent, not theirs.
So how do I stop HR from flooding me with a near-endless stream of applications, without them discarding too many good ones?
I define an easy-to-understand, easy-to-check standard, like: "needs a Masters degree in Visual Computing".
Does that means the people I'll get are any good? For all I know, they bought that degree with their parents' money, or the college they went to is so bad, even a chimpanzee could get a degree. And maybe their "10 years of experience" is of them repeating the same mistakes 10 years long.
Meanwhile, HR is discarding resumés from applicants, who are exactly who I'm looking for. Why? Because they don't have the degree I asked for, or because I forgot that measurable achievements are more important than the number of years you've been doing a job.
I've actually seen one such case: I needed a leader for my database team and got a recommendation for someone who knew nothing of IT, but had tremendous success leading plenty of other teams.
Since all the previous team leaders were such disappointments, I decided to give her a chance. It turns out you don't need to know SQL to lead a team of SQL specialists. Even without any knowledge of computers, she managed to tremendously improve the team's performance, efficiency, and even reputation within only 3 years. If I had my doubts before, I now knew she'd make it to the top. And she did.
At one point she told me her new boss had laid her off due to restructuring. I couldn't believe my ears. A woman like that deserves to lead her own department, and she's getting discharged? Meanwhile, there are plenty of idiots leading their own departments to ruin, who only got their position because they've been around for 40 years? She was obviously being a victim of politics, so I decided to recommend her to my own boss, who was looking for someone to lead Complaint Management. It took her 2 years to turn the company's worst department, into one of the best.
Now she answers directly to the CEO. If it were up to HR, that "foreigner woman with foreign diplomas we can't even decipher, who can't even speak our language properly" would've never made it beyond sales clerk. She made full use of her connections to get recommendations, and only made it this far because she's got the skills to back them up.
Is it fair? Maybe it is, and maybe not. But calling it "nepotism" or "cronyism" is simply ignorant.
The world isn't just black and white. There's good, and there's bad, and there's plenty in-between.
@Rheeve
As criver put it, He has skill just not enough so he has to rely on a recommendation to get a leg up. So yea, I'd call it Cronyism.
Looks like we're obviously not talking about the same thing.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cronyism
> partiality to cronies especially as evidenced in the appointment of political hangers-on to office
without regard to their qualifications
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cronyism
> the practice of favoring one's close friends, especially in political appointments.
> the practice of appointing friends to high-level, esp political, posts
regardless of their suitability
> 1840, "friendship," from crony + -ism. Meaning "appointment of friends to important positions,
regardless of ability" is originally American English, from c.1950.
If he has skills, it's not happening "regardless of his ability", and "getting a leg up" is still far from "getting appointed".
