Two surveys, a few months apart, expose a contradiction most of us carry around.
In a Resume.io survey of 1,000 U.S. workers run by Pollfish in November 2025, 62% said nepotism shakes trust in leadership. Then, in a separate Kickresume survey of 1,030 people worldwide in March 2026, 36% of U.S. respondents said they would definitely use their connections to get ahead of a more qualified candidate.
These are different people asked different questions, so you can’t add them together. But put side by side, they say something uncomfortable. We hate nepotism when it happens to us and quite like it when it works for us.
I don’t think that makes people hypocrites. I think it shows we’ve never agreed on where a fair connection ends and an unfair one begins.
We Judge Connections From Two Different Seats
When someone else’s cousin gets the job, you see the result: a door that was closed to you opened for them. When your old colleague puts in a word for you, you see the reasons. They know your work. They’ve watched you handle a bad week. It feels like evidence, not a favor.
A connection does two very different things. It can carry information (“I’ve worked with her, she’s good at this”). Or it can carry protection (“hire my nephew and don’t ask too many questions”). The first helps employers make better decisions. The second replaces the decision.
Most of us picture the first kind when we use connections, and the second kind when others do.
What the Evidence Says About Hiring People You Know
The research doesn’t support the idea that connected hires are always worse.
A study of nine large firms in call centers, trucking, and high tech, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, found referred workers performed about the same as other hires on most measures. They were also substantially less likely to quit: about 11% less likely in trucking and 26% in high tech. In the two industries where profit per worker could be measured, referred workers earned the firms more.
So referrals often work. The same researchers also found that people tend to refer others like themselves, so strong employees bring in strong hires and weak employees bring in weak ones.
Family succession at the top tells a different story. A study of Danish firms in the same journal found that when a family member took over as CEO, operating profitability on assets fell by at least four percentage points. The damage was worst in fast-growing industries and in firms with highly skilled workers.
My reading: connections help when they add information to a fair process. They hurt when they shrink the talent pool to a single family.
The Quiet Scale of Family Hiring
Most nepotism isn’t a CEO handing the company to his son. It’s ordinary.
Matthew Staiger, a researcher at Harvard’s Opportunity Insights, used Census Bureau data on 48 million young Americans and found that 29% had worked for a parent’s employer at least once by age 30. Starting there raised first-job earnings by 24% compared with peers hired without a parental connection.
The benefit isn’t shared evenly. In the published paper, 7% of children of top-percentile earners got their first job at a parent’s employer, compared with 2% of children from the bottom percentile.
This is the part I find hardest to defend. A single referral can be fair. Millions of them, flowing mostly to families that already have good jobs, turn into a system.
Where the Law Draws the Line
Many people assume nepotism is illegal. For most private U.S. companies, it isn’t.
Government is different. Federal law bars public officials from hiring, promoting or advocating for relatives in their agencies, and many states have similar rules for public officials.
Private employers can still get into legal trouble indirectly. The EEOC warns that word-of-mouth recruiting by a workforce that is mostly one ethnic group may violate Title VII if nearly all new hires end up looking the same. Hiring “people we know” can become discrimination without anyone intending it.
The Real Damage Is to Trust, Not Talent
One detail in the Resume.io data deserves more attention. Respondents said about 70% of family hires they knew of were a good fit for their roles. Yet the trust damage was still there.
That tells me the problem isn’t mainly bad hires. It’s a hidden process. People can live with a connected colleague who is good at the job. What they can’t live with is not knowing whether they ever had a fair shot. In the Kickresume survey, 61% said they would “100%” trust their boss more if promotions were based purely on merit.
How to Use Connections Without Becoming the Nepo Hire
If you’re the one with the connection:
- Ask your contact to pass your application to the hiring manager, not to make the decision.
- Go through the same interviews and tests as everyone else, and ask for that openly.
- Disclose the relationship early. Hidden ties look worse when they come out later.
- Never report to, or be evaluated by, the relative who helped you.
How Managers Can Keep Referrals Fair
If you’re the one hiring:
- Put referred candidates through the same structured interview and scorecard as everyone else.
- Write a simple rule: relatives and partners can’t supervise, hire or review each other.
- Check who your referrals bring in. If everyone looks like your current team, widen your sourcing.
- Give more weight to referrals from your best performers, since people tend to refer people like themselves.
- Publish what it takes to get promoted, then follow it.
Connections aren’t going away, and they shouldn’t. The fix is simple to say and hard to do: let a connection get someone through the door, then make them earn the job.
