(Bloomberg) -- Copy, paste, refer. Over 18 months, that’s the simple process that helped one enterprising tech worker recommend more than a thousand job candidates to his employer. His efforts produced more than half a dozen successful hires for the company and roughly $30,000 in employee referral bonuses for him. No one seemed to mind, or even realize, that nearly every person he endorsed was a complete stranger.
While referrals are typically reserved for known quantities — former colleagues, or at least someone with a mutual acquaintance who can vouch for them — there’s a burgeoning underground market connecting job seekers to anonymous company insiders willing to help them get a foot in the door.
In a job market where searches for work are lengthening and it can seem like resumes are being thrown into a black hole, weary applicants are looking for any edge they can get. Having a referral is no guarantee of a job offer, but it can substantially improve the odds. According to hiring platform Greenhouse, while external applicants have a 1 in 200 chance of being hired, those with referrals have a 1 in 25 chance. (Internal applicants — the ultimate known quantity — have a 1 in 5 chance of getting hired, though they typically only make up some 0.1% of candidates, according to Greenhouse.)
Upping the Odds
On Blind, a free app used by some 12 million tech workers to anonymously discuss their employers, earnest job seekers post dozens of times a day on a forum for jobs and referrals asking about specific roles or companies. The employees — who are identified only by the company they work for, verified at signup via a valid work email address — will comment on the posts if they’re interested in helping, and typically instruct the requester to directly message them to sew up the logistics.
The process looks much the same on employer review site Glassdoor’s referrals forum, except the job seekers there are looking for roles in finance and consulting in addition to tech.
The tech worker who spoke with Bloomberg, who requested anonymity so as not to draw the attention of his employer, said he sourced most of his referrals on Blind. He invites interested candidates to fill out a Google form with their name, email address and a short bio explaining why they’re a good fit for the desired role. He then pastes the information into his company’s referral system. Each submission takes no more than a few seconds to complete, he said. The bounty he stands to earn can be as high as several thousand dollars per hire, depending on the role.
Pay to Play
Job seekers find that one advantage of a platform like Blind is that there’s no fee. There’s also no need to pen a handcrafted solicitation note like on LinkedIn (although for $12 a month, Referral Finder will automate the process of sending cold LinkedIn messages for you).
One marketing professional turned to Blind for referral requests after she was laid off from a live-events ticketing platform. She told Bloomberg that shopping for referrals feels subversive, since the recommendations aren’t based on existing relationships. She recently received five referral offers through Blind, though none were for companies with roles she was particularly interested in.
On sites like Refer Me and Refermarket, job seekers can anonymously request referrals from a verified employee of their target employer. One request per week is free, and users can pay for more frequent access. Costs vary: Refer Me charges $12 a month for unlimited referral requests, while users of Refermarket pay per request, which varies from $50 a piece to as little as $3 each, if they’re on a $29.99-a-month premium plan.
On another site, ReferralHub, insiders name their price. Current listings there range from $10 for an employee referral at ServiceNow to $50 for one at ByteDance, while endorsements for roles at BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Nvidia and Spotify were available for $20 to $25 apiece. A referral for roles at Microsoft was recently indicated as the most popular purchase on the site, having been sold over 200 times at $25 each.
Some of the most active referrers on the Refermarket site come from some of the top companies in the US. Meta, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Google, IBM and Salesforce all had at least one employee — and in some cases two or three — offering referrals on the platform.
Refermarket’s FAQ page says that yes, companies do indeed allow this: “We’ve reached out to companies and cleared things out with a legal team that this is completely fair practice. Companies refer to these kind[s] of referrals as ‘courtesy referrals.’” Other similar platforms also suggest the practice is allowed.
That would be news at Goldman Sachs and Google. A spokesperson for the investment bank said that “[p]articipating in this type of unapproved referral activity is against our code of conduct.”
A spokesperson for Google said referrals must be based on personal knowledge of candidates from their immediate networks, and that those recommendations are vetted and put through the same review process as other applicants.
BlackRock, Microsoft, Nvidia and Spotify declined to comment. Meta, Amazon, IBM and Salesforce did not respond to a request for comment.
Creating a Market
Gilang Pradana, who works part-time as Refermarket’s head of operations from West Java, said in an interview that the platform has amassed 10,000 users since it was founded by a California-based tech worker who was laid off from his job in 2023. About a third, he said, are premium users, who usually pay for the service for about three months.
Around 60% of the site’s users are Indian, many of whom are looking to land a job at one of the big US tech companies, Pradana said. The rest of the platform’s users are mainly based in the US, he said. Out of a dozen requests, a typical referrer will say yes to about seven or eight, Pradana said.
Dominick Tavitian, the founder of rival platform Refer Me, told Bloomberg via email that “there are tons of folks out there we’ve learned who like to give back to those who are potentially qualified and help those who were once in their shoes of looking for a job when they got overlooked.” He said Refer Me’s goal is “to democratize job opportunities for people, so everyone has an equal chance at a job they are qualified for.”
The Risk to Employees
Employee referral programs were always meant to be a win-win-win: for applicants, who get special priority in the hiring process; for employees, who are compensated when their networks produce a successful hire; and for employers, who can shave time and uncertainty from the hiring process by going with a known quantity delivered straight to human resources.
But that value proposition may turn into a win-win-lose as candidates and employees reap the rewards of a commodified process and employers are left sifting through poorly vetted candidates.
If employers are flooded with referrals for strangers, it's not clear how much the recommendations will actually help candidates.
Jenny Dearborn, chief people strategy officer at consulting firm BTS, said that at a prior employer, the talent acquisition team discovered that one employee was making hundreds of referrals per quarter. They never admonished the employee, she said, they simply began ignoring the referrals that person submitted.
Nolan Church, chief executive officer of pay transparency platform FairComp and a longtime tech executive, said that it may make sense for candidates to ask anonymous employees for referrals, since there’s not much to lose. It can be dangerous for employees, though. “The most important asset in your life is your reputation. It takes forever to build it and two seconds to light it on fire,” Church said.
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.