for job,

I watched this thread for some days, I cannot see any Great Solutions for your question.

I will add my thought >> Reference is a Guarantee Mechanism, additional to Interview >> Company checks our reference, we check company's reference, we buy a mobile phone through reference, other's buy our products through reference... It is a sort of Fool-Proofing mechanism which save money & time of the subscriber.

We can take different points of not-having reference OR less-reference.
As the Reference is a necessity, we can see there are lot of Fake References too.

As a fresher
Here we don't need any reference.  Our course, mark sheet, interview performance do the job.  Here no reference needed.

As a company owner
We can start a company & enter the industry, here we don't need any reference.  But getting customers, selling products, requires reference.. 

As a freelancer
Probably, you can land in a job without any reference, they will test your knowledge & you are there.  You can also try online work sites, where your previous work fetches new work, here work acts as the reference, but not definitely people.

As an employee
In almost all cases, I have seen Reference is there - it varies from just a phone call, to a thorough background check.  So Reference is there, only the intensity varies.

Did you see the answer?