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.

I wouldn't trust a referral from someone I don't work with either. Your reputation is on the line, if you don't have one to lose why should anyone care.

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.

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.

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?

I get a lot of these messages via LinkedIn. They say I'm a good candidate for a job, write something, and tell me if I'm interested to apply via <link>. If a recruiter wants a cut, I expect them to work for it. Me filling out a form isn't that.

Unsure if they are real recruiters, or bots. Most of the ones contacted me were based in either Nigeria or Pakistan.

I know it's prejudice, but anytime I click on a Profile and see either of those 2 countries, I immediately hit back and never ever respond/contact that person ever again. It sucks to be an actual good person from those countries, but I don't wanna be scammed

This is not a good defence against being scammed. Like if this is part of your strategy on not getting scammed you should probably go back to the drawing board.

In other words, you’re defense strategy against being scammed should survive talking to someone from these places

Perhaps this is not their entire defense strategy, just the first layer?

I dont know. If u knew how to fight someone, and defend yourself would you still put yourself in situations where you would need to fight someone? You would avoid them in the first place, and then use it if you absolutely have to