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Comment by mtmail | Hacker News Reader

Interesting concept

"By paying £500 now to endorse Paul, you will receive £1000 if Paul is hired and passes probation.

If Paul is hired and fails probation, your payment of £500 will be donated to charity.

If Paul is not hired then your payment of £500 will be refunded."

There are interactive demo pages https://gethigher.io/endorse/demo https://gethigher.io/dashboard/demo linked on the homepage, that qualifies for the "HN users can try it out" (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) even though the service isn't launched yet.

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This seems to be quite a fragile way of offloading some of the recruitment/interview/screening process to the persons friends. What stops Paul paying his friends/acquaintances to endorse him?

Doesn't this perpetuate the lack of diversity in the job market? Whenever I hire I'll ask anyone I know that's worked in the same place if they have an opinion on them - but won't use a lack of one to not bring in for an interview.

> What stops Paul paying his friends/acquaintances to endorse him?

AD: The fact that Paul is taking on all the risk, in effect Paul has made a self-endorsement via proxy... Paul can already self-endorse it's a valid signal of confidence that they feel they can do the job.

This makes tonnes of sense with being confident in yourself to do the job. I would endorse myself

> AD: The fact that Paul is taking on all the risk, in effect Paul has made a self-endorsement via proxy...

Is funding your own stake via a third party explicitly allowed, or is it abuse that's too hard to police and therefore you turn a blind eye, with the above justification?

If the latter, employers should be aware they may be biasing hiring in favour rule-breakers.

For most jobs, there are plenty of people who can do it. Of those people, this system advantages those with easier access to some financial capital. Not great for diversity or social mobility.

> If the latter, employers should be aware they may be biasing hiring in favour rule-breakers.

AD: It doesn't matter if you fund your friends to do it or you do it yourself, someone is taking the risk and so from a signal processing point of view it's a strong signal.

> For most jobs, there are plenty of people who can do it. Of those people, this system advantages those with easier access to some financial capital. Not great for diversity or social mobility.

AD: The stake is commensurate with the salary, and people are likely to be in similar socio-economic bracket with their peers. The rich already have an advantage in life, we can't change that, but we can equal the playing field by adjusting the price per unit of influence to match wealth distribution.

AD: The service has been launched! However it's a manual on-boarding at the moment :)

"Here's 500, please endorse me"

AD: Interestingly... thats just a self-endorsement via a proxy, someone is still taking a risk.

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