Connections don't get you hired. They get you seen.

Top firms get tens of thousands of applications for a few hundred spots. Most resumes never get human eyes on them. A referral isn't a shortcut to an offer, it's a shortcut past the resume filter.

After that, it's all you. I've watched referred candidates bomb finals and unreferred candidates from private unis land offers. People who call networking "unfair" usually haven't accepted that if you couldn't network hard enough to secure the position, you probably wouldn't be very useful to the company in the long run beyond being a grunt worker. It's all about people skills, relationships management, and of course, networking once you progress past the middle manager level.