If you think you're competitive but your resume is being filtered out. Referrals get you past initial online coding challenges with most companies automatically.
Google's referral process makes you describe exactly how you know the person and why you believe they'd be a good fit for Google. It's pretty hard to answer this well if you've just met, and your likelihood of making it past the initial screen is directly proportional to how well your referer makes this case. After a few too many people e-mailing random Googlers and saying "Please refer me to Google!", they added a checkbox for "I don't know this person" which lets you skip all the free-text narratives, but also means that the referral is effectively the same as if a recruiter had sourced your name off LinkedIn. (AFAIK you still get the referral bonus and they still get hired if it turns out they are in fact good, but the referral itself carries no weight.) I usually recommend that people get referred by the Googler who knows their work best; PMing or e-mailing random Googlers hoping to short-circuit the screening process doesn't really work.
Because it doesn't get your foot in the door? This isn't about treating college grads inequitably - it's about incentivizing the introduction of people who a known-good employee vouches for, with respect to their fit for the position, culture, and their qualifications.
I'd like to know how hard it is for other people starting out these days, what's worked for them. I'm not one to ask as I get hounded by Google/Alphabet recruiters every 3-6 months to co-design a role in entry-management/team-lead (SRM) or SWE/SA-SRE.
I'd suggest focusing on one of Go, Rust, Haskell, Elm or Elixir in addition to the customary C++17 or Java/Kotlin... and get some useful packages up on open repos.
