This isn't a consequence of job referrals being public. It's a consequence of them being anonymous. If you saw the same referrer on all the referrals, it would be obvious that something is wrong. It should be obvious to the company that pays the referrals. Same problem as spam - if you can spam anonymously, spam gets out of hand.
A referral program can have two very different purposes:
1. A trusted employee vouches for a potential employee they know personally or worked with before.
2. A way to collect applicants as an alternative or to complement job ads on page. This has the risk as other public referral programs, where it encourages affiliates to advertise the job in spammy and unethical ways, tarnishing the company's reputation.
A public referral program like targets the second purpose, while the author and many posters here assume it aims for the first.
I wouldn’t personally refer anyone I’ve not worked with. What’s the point? Someone being smart isn’t enough, they have to be actually sane and normal to work with. You can be friends with people you wouldn’t want to work with. Someone I’ve not met would be a totally unknown quantity.
I would refer someone I'm friends with if I know them well, understand what they would be like to work with, and understand the job/company well enough.
After all, I've lived with some people that I never worked with. Surely I know them well enough to recommend them for jobs, even though I have not ever worked alongside them.
It was, but in a different form. This is the first I've heard of a random recruiter bonus.
Companies often work with more than one job search agency but there they hired people to find someone - and they often found the same people. There was some incentive to find a good candidate as a bad reputation means you don't get hired to find the next.
I did have recruiters yell at me because I applied for the same job via multiple different recruiters. As if it was my problem to figure that out.
Finding a job when you don't know someone already there has always been a mess for both sides.
This isn't a consequence of job referrals being public. It's a consequence of them being anonymous. If you saw the same referrer on all the referrals, it would be obvious that something is wrong. It should be obvious to the company that pays the referrals. Same problem as spam - if you can spam anonymously, spam gets out of hand.
Anyone seeing this from the hiring side?
A referral program can have two very different purposes:
1. A trusted employee vouches for a potential employee they know personally or worked with before.
2. A way to collect applicants as an alternative or to complement job ads on page. This has the risk as other public referral programs, where it encourages affiliates to advertise the job in spammy and unethical ways, tarnishing the company's reputation.
A public referral program like targets the second purpose, while the author and many posters here assume it aims for the first.
What about a referral program + 5-10 interviews with no intent to hire?
I wouldn’t personally refer anyone I’ve not worked with. What’s the point? Someone being smart isn’t enough, they have to be actually sane and normal to work with. You can be friends with people you wouldn’t want to work with. Someone I’ve not met would be a totally unknown quantity.
I would refer someone I'm friends with if I know them well, understand what they would be like to work with, and understand the job/company well enough.
After all, I've lived with some people that I never worked with. Surely I know them well enough to recommend them for jobs, even though I have not ever worked alongside them.
Can't believe this wasn't already a problem pre LLMs.
It was, it was just hard to do at scale by a lot of different people.
LLMs and other automation tools make things that used to be annoying but uncommon to a steady part of life.
It was, but in a different form. This is the first I've heard of a random recruiter bonus.
Companies often work with more than one job search agency but there they hired people to find someone - and they often found the same people. There was some incentive to find a good candidate as a bad reputation means you don't get hired to find the next.
I did have recruiters yell at me because I applied for the same job via multiple different recruiters. As if it was my problem to figure that out.
Finding a job when you don't know someone already there has always been a mess for both sides.
People checking in code they've never looked at.
People employee-referring other people who they've never worked with, and don't even know at all on a personal level.
Ya'll are fucking crazy.