[ChuckMcM]

Someone referring you (with a positive hire recommendation) from inside the company is always a good thing. Someone referring you for the referral 'bonus' is not worth as much because what makes the first one good is that the person referring can explain why you would be a good fit.

That said, reputations are a thing too. All through my career I've had a mix of people who thought I was great to people who thought I was terrible. It is often a function of how and when you interacted with them, at one place I worked I discovered that a person I had worked with before was had been actively "anti-recruiting" in that they didn't want me to come work there[1]. I was fortunate in that the hiring manager took the time to get a number of opinions and look past the drama and into what really was going on, but it certainly delayed things significantly and would have resulted in a decline had they not been willing to do that digging. This only gets worse the more senior you become because you have more opportunities to be perceived as having limited someone else's career/choices/etc.

So 'referrals' in all forms are a net positive, some can be more positive than others.

That said, one of the more interesting hires I did was a guy who offered to come work for me for free for two weeks on the promise that at the end of the two weeks we'd either hire him or not. Was a bit challenging to get that through HR/Legal (but we did) and he turned out to be great. But it wasn't obvious from his CV that he was as capable as he was and he did not have anyone locally that could be a reference.

[1] I did reconcile what had happened with this person but they were completely accurate when they described me as an "asshole". I really was annoying early in my career, but that didn't become clear to me until later.