YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Don't Make Job Referrals Public

14 points elashri 1 hour ago 8 comments

georgemcbay 52 minutes ago | parent

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.

ngruhn 49 minutes ago | parent

Can't believe this wasn't already a problem pre LLMs.

Ensorceled 40 minutes ago | parent

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.

bluGill 38 minutes ago | parent

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.

physicsguy 40 minutes ago | parent

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.

cyberamirul 33 minutes ago | parent

A referral used to mean "I read your thesis." Now it means "I have twenty tokens." The bonus didn't change, so of course the behavior did.

CodesInChaos 21 minutes ago | parent

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.

glouwbug 16 minutes ago | parent

What about a referral program + 5-10 interviews with no intent to hire?