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Ask HN: What's the best referral bonus you have ever got?

8 pointsby pythonclonerabout 10 years ago
Recently I heard from my friends that companies started giving referral bonus of $10k for eng hires. I used to get $5k per referral. Just wanted to know what's the cost of hiring today and how referrals save money to the company?

6 comments

romanhnabout 10 years ago
Referrals save money in a few ways. External recruiting agencies can cost somewhere in the range of 15-25% of the candidate&#x27;s first year&#x27;s salary. You can see how referrals would make a lot of sense from just a financial standpoint. There are other benefits though - for one, referrals have a higher likelihood of responding to outreach, making it through the interview process, fitting in, and sticking around. I&#x27;m sure the referrer doesn&#x27;t mind the extra dough either :)<p>In terms of referral bonus amounts, my company (PagerDuty, YC S10) offers between $5K and $20K depending on the role and priority. This includes engineering roles as well. The cool thing is we pay out for external referrals. Anyone can send a referral our way and if a hire is made, you&#x27;ll get paid the full amount. Not too many companies do that :)
BinaryIdiotabout 10 years ago
Depends on industry, location, etc. Every single time I&#x27;ve almost gotten a referral bonus something changes or goes wrong so I&#x27;ve never gotten one but I know a few folks who have received $10k for developers who are fully cleared in the Annapolis &#x2F; D.C. area. Getting cleared is costly so if you can refer someone who is already cleared they&#x27;ll give you nice bonuses (sometimes even higher if they&#x27;re in an urgent need).
sohamabout 10 years ago
Many companies in the Valley give $10K referral bonuses, for technical, design and product roles. It&#x27;s cheap for them to offer that, compared to paying 20% of first-year&#x27;s salaries to external recruiting agencies.<p>It&#x27;s less for other roles.<p>(Source: 10 years in the valley. Made several hires, set recruiting processes at my last company, and now I run a bootcamp for technical interview prep: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;InterviewKickstart.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;InterviewKickstart.com</a>)
bitshepherdabout 10 years ago
Referral... bonus? These are things? Seriously, though. Every referral I&#x27;ve made in my career has flaked out at some point. It doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s a person I&#x27;ve known for years, or someone I recently met at a meetup or over coffee.<p>I&#x27;ve made it a point to refer not a single person again because I&#x27;m tired of my and my employer&#x27;s time being pissed away, when we can just dispense with the bullshit and get back to doing real work.
g8gggu89about 10 years ago
Where I work it&#x27;s 5k for some positions (or maybe even only 3k?), and about half that for most positions. I&#x27;ve also worked places where the rules kept shifting and&#x2F;or were always overly complex, like we were doing door to door vacuum sales instead of sw development. It&#x27;s one of those things I&#x27;d probably never count on getting, like performance based bonuses.
eonwabout 10 years ago
i worked a company that had great referral program, i referred two employees. when the topic came up of how i go about getting my fees, i was basically laughed at and told to leave HR&#x27;s area.<p>has anyone ever actually been paid out for a referral?