GoKawiilI am currently in the job market, so I receive some recruiter emails. Recently, I started seeing a slightly different kind of message.
I posted in Hacker News' "Who wants to be hired?" thread with a short description of my background: physics, C++, CUDA, GPU programming, machine learning, and some recent work around LLM inference.
A little while later, several different people contacted me about the same Senior Software Engineer position. Their messages mentioned specific parts of my background, but they all led to the same company. Each included a different referral code.
The job ad says a successful referral pays $1,500. The payment only happens if the candidate is hired through that referral, so this is not a complaint about people being paid for every application.
The problem is what that incentive does when the referral program is public.
I am not an obvious fit for the role. I am finishing a PhD and moving toward industry, while the position is explicitly senior. I have some relevant technical overlap, but I would not describe myself as the established senior engineer the title suggests.
It seems unlikely that several unrelated people independently studied my experience and all decided I was an unusually strong candidate for the same senior position. A more likely explanation is that my comment, along with the other posts in the thread, was searched for keywords. I looked vaguely plausible, and sending me a message was cheap compared with the chance of earning $1,500.
The messages are also easy to personalize at scale. An LLM can produce a note that mentions my background in physics, CUDA, or LLM inference without the sender knowing much more about me than those keywords.
I do not particularly blame the people who contacted me. They are responding rationally, from their perspective, to the incentives the company created. But from the candidate's perspective, the result is spam: several unsolicited messages from strangers, each trying to get credit if I eventually get hired.
A traditional referral usually carries some information. Someone knows the candidate, has worked with them, has seen their work, or at least knows enough about them to say, "I think this person is worth talking to."
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