Public referral bounties spark AI-personalized recruiter spam, job seeker warns
A physics PhD candidate who posted a 'Who wants to be hired?' listing on Hacker News describing skills in C++, CUDA, GPU programming and LLM inference was contacted by multiple unrelated people, each pitching the same senior software engineering role at one company with a different referral code attached. The job's referral program reportedly pays $1,500 per successful hire, and the messages appeared to use keyword matching and AI-generated personalization rather than genuine assessment of fit.