Hi Andrew, you're right on multiple points, please let me not go TL;DR on this one:
- Referrals for the sake of taking advantage of your friends are rubish. I'm with you on that one. Like you, I know multiple referral-only platforms that went bankrupt already, many more will and I do not wish us to become one of them.
- JOBBOX.io started out as a pure referral-based mechanism, however, compared to other referral mechanisms, it was quite hard to push through a referral as you needed to write down a propper recommendation letter (we checked all of them) and your friend needed to apply. We launched on March this year and soon realised this was definitely not enough.
- We then implemented the "apply now" mechanism as a result of user feedback (http://blog.jobbox.io/listening-to-feedback-and-making-chang...). In order for an application to go forward the candidates needed someone who could refer them. Again, before the application was approved, our team did a "5-minutes check" just to make sure everything on the application made sense. This small step prevented "crappy" applications from being sent over to the employers.
- We realised that, from our 3 key users: employers, candidates and referrers, the candidates were the ones that we needed to focus on. So, we've re-built our entire homepage communication from being referral-oriented, to become candidate-oriented.
- Since then we've been shifting away from the referral-oriented communication and we're heading into a candidate-oriented one.
- What next? We're building core functionalities that support candidates, like talent advice, evaluation tools and job offers scoring. Still, we're keeping (and improving) the referral system as we believe that someone should get rewarded for making an on-target referral.
Sorry for the long reply but as I mentioned to @ftpaul early today, your comment deserved a proper reply as I agree with your argumentation, and wanted to give you a sneak peek into JOBBOX.io future.
Red flag. Copy-paste from another comment: "37 old Java professional from Sweden spends all of his savings in two months? You have 5 kids or something?"
Until date no company was able to tackle that issue. There's some startups trying to solve that, for instance http://www.jobbox.io, but I think that problem will be solved with a mix of machine learning and referrals.
This problem is very difficult to fix because we're dealing w/ people and their careers, which bring confidentiality into the equation and that messes up a bit.
Also, this issue is exponentially horrible when it comes to tech recruitment. No one is f* available nowadays but there are plenty of passive tech workers.