HACKER Q&A
📣 tauser1

Normal for recruiters to message your LinkedIn contacts for references?


A Ycombinator company had reached out to me via workatastartup.com and after going through with the interview process they asked for references before they can make an offer, which I promptly provided. The company did reach out to the references I had provided but also added random contacts from my LinkedIn and asked them to provide references for me - I had multiple friends reach out to me asking me about the application, when I had no intention or knowledge that they will find out about my interview process.

This sounds like a gross violation of my privacy as I would expect for the interview process to be confidential.

After learning about this, I reached out to the recruiter only to receive a "my bad - the upper management had asked me to do this and I won't do it again" reply.

Has this happened to anyone else?

  👤 auslegung Accepted Answer ✓
This is not ok. How do they know they haven’t reached out to your direct manager, and that they’ve now damage that relationship? This would be a big red flag for me about this company, even more so if upper management asked for it.