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

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 :)

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).

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.

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.

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?

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)