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Comment by addaon | Hacker News Reader

Ask the best people you’ve ever worked with who the best people they’ve worked with are. Recurse. When names start repeating through different graph paths, make those people an offer they can’t refuse. Once they join, ask them to do the same, and give them the budget and role to make it happen.

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The best people I've ever worked with and the best people they've worked with all have good jobs at all times. You have to have a mechanism for matching with people who are actually interested in a new job.

Yes, making people an offer they can't refuse isn't scalable. It generally requires both deep pockets and the time investment to understand what would motivate them to leave a good job for one that they think can be great.

Is this really battle-tested, as in: did you see this work in practice or do you have a reliable source?

Or is this something you came up with?

I am aware of several startups that started this way, and have been involved in some. The quality of the results depends on who you seed the graph with, of course; but I’ve seen it work well.

As requested by the original poster, it doesn’t scale.

No, this is 100% battle tested. I can't drop numbers but we just did a study at work comparing referrals to non-referrals... its night and day. Referrals are out performing across the board. the only problem is that eventually you run out of referrals

>> Referrals are out performing across the board

I expect a lot of that is due to the referral being familiar with an already ensconced employee, as well as the referrer being incentivized to ensure the referral's success.

+1, referred candidates at my company perform way better in interviews and on the job compared to cold applicants

Unless you're hiring for rare roles that require niche skills, it's unlikely that you'll get people that are in overlapping networks. If you do, you might be encountering the problem where Company A has a bunch of people that used to work at Company B. Now Company A is just an "old boys club" from Company B and is biased towards their old colleagues.

If you ask for single referrals, how do you combat the problem of people just recommended people based on friendships and not actually work quality?

> it's unlikely that you'll get people that are in overlapping networks

Networks all overlap if you search deep enough, ask Kevin Bacon. For good-enough talent and starting with random nodes, yeah, you'll probably not overlap. But there's a few dozen people of top talent for any particular role you're looking for, so by the time you iterate to the top of the tree, you really do get a lot of repeats.

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