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A refers B, B refers C, and C gets hired. Who gets paid?
In services businesses, a large share of hires arrive through employee networks — and every applicant tracker models a referral as one person pointing at one candidate.
That is not how networks work, and it is why referral bounties get argued about in a spreadsheet.
What is different
The chain is recorded, not reconstructed.
Who introduced whom is captured at the moment the introduction is made, walking back as far as the chain goes. So when a hire lands, the question who actually produced this is a lookup rather than an argument in somebody's memory at quarter end.
What pays today is the employee referral. The rest of the chain is kept and visible — which is what makes the programme reviewable — but a hop that runs through a candidate does not currently produce a bounty, and you should design your scheme knowing that.
- Employees refer from their own portal —
Not an email to HR. A surface they already use for payslips and leave.
- It bridges into hiring —
A referral becomes a candidate on the same person record, so the referred person is not a duplicate of someone already in your database.
- The chain is recorded, even where it does not pay —
Who introduced whom is kept whether or not a bounty follows it — which is what makes a referral programme reviewable rather than anecdotal.
Before you announce a scheme
One answer you need first.
›Does a multi-hop chain actually pay out today?
Employee referrals pay. A chain that runs through candidates is recorded and does not currently produce a payout for the candidate hops. If your scheme is built on chained bounties, design it around employees for now and ask us where the rest stands — we would rather say this than let you publish a policy the product cannot honour.
›Can we keep it simple and pay only the direct referrer?
Yes — set first degree to 100% and the rest to zero. The model supports the simple case; it just does not force it.
›What if the referred person was already in our database?
They resolve to the existing record. The referral is recorded against that person rather than creating a second one, which is also how a duplicate bounty gets prevented.
›Does the bounty pay through payroll?
Incentives and payouts live in the people module of the same platform, so the handover is not a spreadsheet.
Book a demo
Bring a referral chain that got argued about.
We will model the split on the call and show you what the record would have said.