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Comment by notafraudster | Hacker News Reader

The proposed "blind referral" system, where people refer people they don't even know for jobs, seems like it should be a completely worthless signal on the hiring side. On the referrer side the benefit is obvious, if the person gets the job you get cash. But on the company side, what is the value of a referral that's predicated specifically on a shallow social interaction?

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It’s better for small companies it’s since it incentivizes employees to advertise their company to other professionals. For a large company that has many applicants it’s less valuable but it could also be an indicator that applicant at least hangs out in the same networking circles.

Even at large companies, I have seen instances (not common but instances) if candidate playing one group against the other so I guess you are incentivized to pull them in your group.

For now Blind might have a sufficiently high quality network to make this worthwhile even on hiring. You wouldn't find it unless you were serious "enough" about your career, even if there is a ton centered around LC grinding and TC chasing.

Probably it's less that it's high quality, so much as it's not huge enough to introduce too much noise into the referral pipelines yet.

The company is still getting a good lead, and the referral bonus is tiny compared to what you'd have to pay a recruiter.

> notafraudster

Well, there's your problem.

Seems like it’s just a by-product of these megacorps being big clanking bureaucracies that haven’t caught on to this trend yet.

The incentives are aligned. You only get paid for referring (presumably) _good_ candidates that get hired, and the company saves a huge amount of money and hassle on not having to deal with and pay an external recruiter (which can cost something like 25% of a new hires first year base salary).

its basically the same as paying a recruiter, except your employee acts as the recruiter. it might even have more signal.

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