Four different recruiters have all said they almost only interview referrals because there are so many they rarely get to non referrals before they have enough qualified candidates.

In this shit market we have to use our network to realistically get a job anymore. It's probably not true for every company of type of job of course.

Taking the Work Out of Networking and Never Search Alone I found to be the best resources on how to do it.

One friend has been job searching for over a year now and he's brilliant. Another has been underemployed for 9 months and just finally got a serious round of interviews. And I was unemployed for 7 weeks. One interview was from a cold application, all the rest were referrals.