I am currently in the job market, so I receive some recruiter emails. Recently, I started seeing a slightly different kind of message.
I posted in Hacker News' "Who wants to be hired?" thread with a short description of my background: physics, C++, CUDA, GPU programming, machine learning, and some recent work around LLM inference.
A little while later, several different people contacted me about the same Senior Software Engineer position. Their messages mentioned specific parts of my background, but they all led to the same company. Each included a different referral code.
The job ad says a successful referral pays $1,500. The payment only happens if the candidate is hired through that referral, so this is not a complaint about people being paid for every application.
The problem is what that incentive does when the referral program is public.
I am not an obvious fit for the role. I am finishing a PhD and moving toward industry, while the position is explicitly senior. I have some relevant technical overlap, but I would not describe myself as the established senior engineer the title suggests.
It seems unlikely that several unrelated people independently studied my experience and all decided I was an unusually strong candidate for the same senior position. A more likely explanation is that my comment, along with the other posts in the thread, was searched for keywords. I looked vaguely plausible, and sending me a message was cheap compared with the chance of earning $1,500.
The messages are also easy to personalize at scale. An LLM can produce a note that mentions my background in physics, CUDA, or LLM inference without the sender knowing much more about me than those keywords.
I do not particularly blame the people who contacted me. They are responding rationally, from their perspective, to the incentives the company created. But from the candidate's perspective, the result is spam: several unsolicited messages from strangers, each trying to get credit if I eventually get hired.
A traditional referral usually carries some information. Someone knows the candidate, has worked with them, has seen their work, or at least knows enough about them to say, "I think this person is worth talking to."
Here, the referrer may know nothing about me beyond a public comment and a few matching keywords. The referral code mainly determines who gets the bonus if I am hired. It does not explain why that person is in a position to recommend me.
That is not necessarily dishonest. It is simply closer to candidate sourcing than to a personal referral.
There is a cost for the company, too. A public referral program can generate more outreach and more applications without producing better candidates. Recruiters have more noise to filter, candidates receive more quasi-personalized messages, and the referral itself carries less information.
A company may reasonably decide that $1,500 is worth paying for a successful hire. The issue is not the size of the payment or the fact that it is conditional. The issue is making the payment available to anyone willing to send cold emails to public profiles.
Referrals work better when the referrer is expected to know something about the person being recommended. Broad candidate sourcing can be handled through recruiters, job boards, communities, and advertising.
Once a referral program becomes a public competition for attribution, candidates stop experiencing it as a recommendation. They experience it as spam.
So please don't make job referrals public.