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Refer A Tech Worker, Get $20,000: Redwood City Startup ThoughtSpot Offers Huge Bounties

REDWOOD CITY (CBS SF) -- A Peninsula startup is hoping to attract the best and brightest in its search for new employees by offering cold, hard cash -- $20,000 to be exact -- to people who refer a successful candidate, saying "Refer a rockstar, get treated like one."

Business intelligence firm ThoughtSpot is offering the $20,000 bounty -- and here's the catch -- only to friends and family members of current employees who refer a qualified recruit. The candidate must be hired, and stay at least three months with ThoughtSpot for the $20,000 bonus to be paid.

CEO Ajeet Singh said ThoughtSpot is looking to increase its staff from 25 to 60 employees within the year. He said it is harder to find qualified people than it is to convince them to work for his company.

The Redwood City-based company is looking to become the Google of business data; a search engine that will instantly display results of available enterprise data that is usually siloed within companies, and is quite time-consuming to find.

"We do get a lot of resumes. But the problem we are trying to solve is a really big problem and it's very hard to solve, and it requires the best of the best people," said Singh. "For us, this is a way to keep the bar very high."

Singh said it is harder to find qualified people than it is to convince them to work for his company, and he hopes the cash incentive will give his firm access to top candidates that otherwise may be looking to catch on with more well-known companies.

"We don't have the resources or the brand name to be able to attract them," said Singh. "So through our network, through people who are going to get to us through LinkedIn or Facebook, if they make the referral of these people to us, then we can go and hire much higher quality of people than if we were to work with a recruiter."

Singh added that ThoughSpot can get much better qualified candidates through such word-of-mouth referrals that through traditional recruiters.

ThoughtSpot is looking to increase its staff from 25 to 60 employees within the year.

Earlier Wednesday, the company announced $30 million in new venture funding.

 

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