Yeah, I'd second this. Anecdotally, I work in a small/medium business and I've heard "does somebody know anybody who can _____" many, many times over the years. In the viewpoint of management, it's much easier, cheaper, and less risky to hire someone on referral than go through the entire application song and dance.

I've done a lot of interviewing as a relatively low level engineer and its an expensive process in general for a company. Per each candidate you're looking at a few hours per engineer, times how many people are on the interview. It ends up costing the company a few thousand just to talk to a candidate over the course of the processes.

If you're a company looking for 5 good employees, you're going to spend a lot of money interviewing all the people that don't make the cut, grabbing someone internally or by reference is far cheaper. It's sorta a gamble when moving on with an interviewee. You basically need to make a low information gamble based on a cheaper short screening, to see if its worth the time for a full interview.

I don't really support no-interview hires unless they previously worked in that position, left, and came back though.