Great question. It is something which we ourselves asked quite a bit. Currently we don't vet the person who recommends. We leave that decision on to the companies we work with. We have found that credentials of the person who recommends ends up being important to the companies.
We also score the recommender if any of their recommendations ends up getting interviewed.
Wrt seeding, it's currently with a combination of personal networks and launches within niche communities.
Regarding growing, we have seen that a bunch of people who are recommended end up giving recommendations as well
Interesting take. But when looking for a job sometimes your 'network' is a good place too look.
I personally have worked with many people. Some are on my 'just hire them, dont worry about it list'. There are others on my 'do not hire them ever they will destroy any group they end up in' list. There are also 'yeah they will do ok, but meh' list. I personally put myself in the 3rd list.
I also am no longer interested in sharing that info for free to companies that are trying to break into the same space as linkedin.
Hiring is broken big time. But this does not look like it fixes much. The real issue in many companies is a lack of understanding from HR what the manager needs. Even sometimes the manager does not even really know. Or HR has an ideal they want and think there are other qualities that 'fit the form'. From someone who is hiring how would this system cut out the cruft of 'ok I have a random resume sent in how do I know it is any good?' No amount of internet points helps me say 'yeah that is a good one'.
Yeah. That does happen to be an inherent problem with a recommendation/referral based system. We do see that people recommend engineers very similar to them in profile/demographic. We try to solve it by seeding with a diverse base of scouts.