The New $30,000 Side Hustle: Making Job Referrals for Strangers (bnnbloomberg.ca) 15
Tech workers at major U.S. companies are earning thousands of dollars by referring job candidates they've never met, creating an underground marketplace for employment referrals at firms like Microsoft and Nvidia, according to Bloomberg.
One tech worker cited in the report earned $30,000 in referral bonuses after recommending over 1,000 strangers to his employer over 18 months, resulting in more than six successful hires. While platforms like ReferralHub charge up to $50 per referral, Goldman Sachs and Google said such practices violate their policies. Google requires referrals to be based on personal knowledge of candidates.
One tech worker cited in the report earned $30,000 in referral bonuses after recommending over 1,000 strangers to his employer over 18 months, resulting in more than six successful hires. While platforms like ReferralHub charge up to $50 per referral, Goldman Sachs and Google said such practices violate their policies. Google requires referrals to be based on personal knowledge of candidates.
and why are the companies not flagging high number (Score:3)
and why are the companies not flagging high numbers from one worker?
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Article numbers (Score:4, Interesting)
Article tidbits
According to hiring platform Greenhouse,
- external applicants have a 1 in 200 chance of being hired
- referrals have a 1 in 25 chance
- Internal applicants — have a 1 in 5 chance of getting hired and make 0.1% of candidates
Done through the free Blind app with 12 million tech workers
- anonymously discuss employers
- employees are identified by the company they work for and validated by work email address used to sign up with Blind
- job seekers post on a forum for jobs asking about specific roles or companies
- Employee will comment on the posts and typically instruct the requester to directly message them for a referral
- One employee has a google form the job seeker fills out with name, email address, short bio and why they are a good candidate for the job. The employee cuts and pastes that into the company's job referral site.
Glassdoor referral forum is essentially the same way with tech, finance and consulting jobs
Other sites have free plus paid flat rate or subscription referrals - Refer Me, Refermarket
ReferralHub has employees naming their price with some in the $10 to $50 range.
Refermarket numbers
- Has 10,000 users
- About 33% are premium users who usually pay for the service for about three months.
- Around 60% of users are Indian
- Out of a dozen requests, a typical referrer will say yes to about seven or eight
Quotes:
"the talent acquisition team discovered that one employee was making hundreds of referrals per quarter. They never admonished the employee, she said, they simply began ignoring the referrals that person submitted."
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Idk, but high numbers are probably fine if they are referring people who were found to be good quality candidates. And it would be a bigger issue if it's just random people who pay a $50 bribe that gets split with an existing employee by the referral site in exchange for a recommendation.
The question is going to be can or do they have any way of vetting the job seekers they are considering to refer, Or is it a blind process?
And how the employee making the referral tells the employer - If they're certify
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Companies offer these programs because they want more referrals. The company only pays workers for referring applicants who actually get hired. They don't get paid per referral -only per actual hire (and possibly only after they pass their probationary period).
What happened to disable ads checkbox? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why did Slashdot remove the disable ads checkbox as a way of thanking long time subscribers?
Guess the AI replacing the useless editors came up with this idea to drive up revenue and simultaneously drive out the last remaining participants?
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Ya I noticed the same thing. I had always shown ads before as they were pretty unobtrusive, but today I noticed they went really overboard. Enabled my adblocker and noticed they implemented some checking, but it was pretty trivial to work around them.
What did you do? I found these custom rules https://github.com/uBlockOrigi... [github.com] kinda fixed the issue.
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Ya I noticed the same thing. I had always shown ads before as they were pretty unobtrusive, but today I noticed they went really overboard. Enabled my adblocker and noticed they implemented some checking, but it was pretty trivial to work around them.
I also allowed ads but now the ads are so obnoxious it looks like a spam site.
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Yeah, the whole site is a mess. The account settings pages seem broken too.
In other words (Score:2)
And the idea that there's a website that will facilitate this sort of networking activity for pennies, and undercutting the traditional job-recruiter model..... also not particularly surprising. Someone is using the internet to disrupt yet another old-fashioned employment model? Jeeves, fetch my fainting couch. What actually surprises me is that there are still any old fashioned job models remaining to disrupt.
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I think the possible problem here is with recruiters the employer KNOWS they are dealing with a recruiter. So while recruiters also do shady stuff: It's legally on the Up and up, And doesn't get the recruiter in trouble.
Whereas with these paid referral sites: The employer has no knowledge or consent to a recruitment agreement. The person being given the referral is paying money to the website that gets split with the person making the referral, And the person making the referral and vouching
Nothing burger (Score:4, Insightful)
So, out of 1000 referrals from that person, there were 6 hires... I know it seems like it's a scam, but seriously, do they care at all about the referral? It seems like at best it did nothing at all for the candidate, and more likely they considered a referral by this person to be a negative...
I seems like the system works.. and if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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Except the company is out an extra $80,000.
($50*1,000 purchased referrals + $30k profit).
Getting paid for your opinion? (Score:2)
There's nothing wrong with getting paid for your opinion. Consultants do it for a living. But it has to be a bona fide opinion, based on your actual experience. Not some phony imprimatur from you in a hustle for cash. Surely by reputation we can tell the difference between the two.