[retroafroman]

Which again, circles back to reputation building. Somebody, as you say, has to be impressed/like you enough to make the effort of pushing your information through the ranks to get hired. If you know the person from some other context, it's possible. If you're another resume from the stack, it's much more difficult to get that attention from anyone-HR, engineers, managers-in the company.

[wladimir]

There's many ways of getting attention of people within a company than piling your resume on the stack;

- talking at tech conferences / local user group (as the OP noted)

- contributing to open source projects

- keeping an interesting blog about a technical topic

and so on...