In my professional area of interest, the United Nations and the World Bank are seen as the holy grails of employers. But the common consensus is that it takes “Connections” to get a job in one of these places, and that there is little hope of even getting an interview if you go only through conventional job advertisement channels. I assume that this sort of thing goes for organisations in other lines of work as well.
Is this really true, and if so, how does it work? I have two specific questions about this:
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why would this be attractive to the employer? If the candiate using the Connection happens to be close to the ideal, then it would be good for the company to take them without having to go through the long search process. But assuming, like most of us, the candiate is not quite ideal, would the company really want to make a long-term commitment to this candidate just to save a little trouble now? I know that I certainly would not, and the few times I have heard of people trying to get into my current company using their Connections, I have heard the same.
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exactly what makes a good Connection? The simplest case is if your contact is the boss in the department you would like to work for, call it department ‘A’. But what if your contact is in department ‘C’? How would that help? And what if your contact is in department A, but is junior to the person who will be doing the hiring, can you expect this junior to exert influence? Conversely, I would imagine that if your contact is a couple of steps senior to the person doing the hiring, they may be hesitant to meddle so far down the line.
So it seems to me that cases where Connections actually work would be very limited, yet people still say this is the only way to get some of these jobs.
So are there any Dopers out there who actually have first-hand experience with Connections for jobs, either on the giving or receiving end of things? I would love to hear your experiences.