Yeah I’ve never seen an employee recommendation not lead to at least an interview. This is one of the biggest lasting benefits of my MBA — if I’m ever out of a job, I can just find a company I want to work for and I probably know someone relatively influential there. It’s sort of a professional courtesy to recommend business school classmates even decades afterwards. These network effects are also why there’s often a bimodal distribution in outcomes between “top” schools and the rest of the pack.