That $2,000 bonus you’re offering for every referral hire you make is going to seem like chump change this morning for anyone who caught last night’s news.
CBS aired a piece about a Silicon Valley startup offering $20,000 — that’s right, $20,000 — for every tech hire made from a referral who came from an employee company friend or family.
“We want the best of the best,” ThoughtSpot CEO Ajeet Singh told the San Francisco Chronicle, which wrote about the rich referral before it aired on CBS. “We thought $20,000 was an interesting enough number that a lot of people might actually refer people to us.”
By no means is this the first such juicy referral bonus.
Dr. John Sullivan noted a similarly pricey reward for referring a software engineer in a post two years ago. Other companies, desperate to hire workers with hard to find, in-demand skills, have offered similar rewards. But for some reason, ThoughtSpot’s program caught the attention of San Francisco media, which featured the program a few days ago and the news spread rapidly across the country.
There’s an interesting question that comes up during the interview about the potential for poaching from some of the Valley’s “biggies.” “We’re too small,” the CEO says. But if the program succeeds at ThoughtSpot — and already the company has hired a few engineers through the program — it could turn employee referrals into the equivalent of en employment arms race.