But let's also be honest: startup founders aren't hiring "their chums" out of some unethical sense of helping their friends who don't deserve it, they're hiring people they know and who they have good reason to believe are going to help them succeed. The fact that their chums tend to be people who look like them and think like them is an unfortunate side effect of this, but the idea of getting candidates via networking is not fundamentally wrong when the goal is finding people you think are going to contribute. Personal experience with a candidate is a very strong bit of signal in an otherwise very flawed process.
It's not a fundamentally bad idea from a practical point of view (like I said, I'll leave the ethics out of it), but I think it is not as good an idea as a lot of people think as it narrows the field so much. Also the signal that people get, unless they have worked directly with a person, rather than just chatted with them at a networking event or know them from their childhood, is I would argue "belongs to my tribe", rather than "good at x"
Yes, that's totally fair. But I'll say that I've taken or been offered "networking-enhanced" job opportunities in startups a handful of times, and they were always people I knew and had worked with directly, or in one case, someone who was extremely close to a person I had worked with directly.
"Chatted with someone at a networking event" seems like an extremely weak signal, and I'd be suspicious of that type of hire.
> aren't hiring "their chums" out of some unethical sense of helping their friends who don't deserve it, they're hiring people they know and who they have good reason to believe are going to help them succeed
No one says "I'm going to unethically help people who don't deserve it," so let's discard that part.
They're cheating at the normal hiring practice, not allowing other candidates in, because they think it gives them some sort of advantage. And that doesn't look entirely ethical.
It's only deemed "business unethical" if someone can prove discrimination in court, though. And that's honest.
> They're cheating at the normal hiring practice, not allowing other candidates in, because they think it gives them some sort of advantage.
No, they're not "cheating," they are taking a shortcut to a known good candidate so they can get their job done quickly. If you need an employee and you know of one that would meet your needs, you have no obligation to search far and wide just in case there's someone else who's just as qualified out of some sense of fairness. The fact that some organizations behave as if that's a requirement is simply a self-imposed (or sometimes contractually-imposed by some other org e.g. via government contract) safety mechanism that helps reduce the opportunity for corruption (or the appearance of corruption).
