That’s not always true. I’ve recommended 3 engineers from my previous company to apply at my current company. All of them I deeply respected for their skills and thought they were smarter than I was.
None of them got offers. One didn’t even get past the take-home. I worked with them. I KNOW they had the tech skills to do it.
>One way to bypass these interview tests is networking.
Has that ever worked at a FAANG?
I'm not sure if licensing will work. We already have "licensing" via Microsoft/etc certificates. And my experience is that we test these people with certificates even harder because of the poor reputation of these certificates.