| A pure meritocracy would work if you frequently have one clear-cut best candidate for the position, but that is not the case. Especially for entry-level positions, you're likely going to get many people who are all equally qualified, so who are you going to hire? Someone that you know only on paper and a few interviews? Or somebody who your colleague personally knows (whether its through a friendship, school, previous job) and would vouch for? With the former, you don't know for sure what kind of an employee you're getting, but that's not so much the case with the latter.
At one company I used to work for, many of the interns got their jobs because they knew a current intern. The project manager and the VP had actually asked me specifically to recruit new people a few times. You can draw a tree diagram and see how they all led back to one person (who actually stopped working there years ago). There are only a handful who got offers by just sending in a resume, but many of them did not work out. At least within this company, experience has shown that the best employees were the ones who a current or former intern vouched for. |