Hence the good ol' "We'll give you $5,000 for every engineer you refer to us...and there's no cap!" At least good companies do this anyway. Also, executive se

Hence the good ol' "We'll give you $5,000 for every engineer you refer to us...and there's no cap!" At least good companies do this anyway. Also, executive search recruiters kind-of do what you're describing. Exec leadership is a small-ish world, and the recruiting cycle for, say, a CTO can take months. However, there's a lot of commission on the other end of that. So recruiters basically act as brokers.