

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

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&#x27;s the cost of hiring today and how referrals save money to the company?
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romanhn
Referrals save money in a few ways. External recruiting agencies can cost
somewhere in the range of 15-25% of the candidate's first year'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'm sure the referrer doesn't mind the extra
dough either :)

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'll
get paid the full amount. Not too many companies do that :)

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BinaryIdiot
Depends on industry, location, etc. Every single time I've almost gotten a
referral bonus something changes or goes wrong so I've never gotten one but I
know a few folks who have received $10k for developers who are fully cleared
in the Annapolis / D.C. area. Getting cleared is costly so if you can refer
someone who is already cleared they'll give you nice bonuses (sometimes even
higher if they're in an urgent need).

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soham
Many companies in the Valley give $10K referral bonuses, for technical, design
and product roles. It's cheap for them to offer that, compared to paying 20%
of first-year's salaries to external recruiting agencies.

It's less for other roles.

(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:
[http://InterviewKickstart.com](http://InterviewKickstart.com))

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bitshepherd
Referral... bonus? These are things? Seriously, though. Every referral I've
made in my career has flaked out at some point. It doesn't matter if it's a
person I've known for years, or someone I recently met at a meetup or over
coffee.

I've made it a point to refer not a single person again because I'm tired of
my and my employer's time being pissed away, when we can just dispense with
the bullshit and get back to doing real work.

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g8gggu89
Where I work it's 5k for some positions (or maybe even only 3k?), and about
half that for most positions. I've also worked places where the rules kept
shifting and/or were always overly complex, like we were doing door to door
vacuum sales instead of sw development. It's one of those things I'd probably
never count on getting, like performance based bonuses.

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eonw
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's area.

has anyone ever actually been paid out for a referral?

