My team and I applied to what looked like a normal LinkedIn job posting from a company called Capital To Keys. Turned out it was a lead-gen funnel. The poster converted our application into a pitch call and then asked us to refer him business. The posting had worked on sophisticated operators, which was us.
Instead of writing it off as a nuisance, I decided to run the same play for Common Ground. Use job postings as an inbound engine to recruit commission-only referral partners for CG, Kanopi, LÏEF, and HighTide.
Getting caught by the funnel was proof of concept, not an embarrassment. If the tactic worked on people who study this stuff for a living, it would work as a real acquisition channel, and it could be run honestly, with real commission disclosure and no bait and switch.
We reverse-engineered the exact anatomy of the posting, a channel-framed title, a business-first body, honest commission disclosure, an application that doubled as a relationship map, and built four parallel postings across CG, Kanopi, LÏEF, and a gated HighTide lane, with tracking and a referral agreement to back it.
When somebody outmaneuvers you cleanly, the smart move is to study the move, not resent it.
Getting played was the whole reason we adopted the tactic on our own terms, instead of treating the whole channel as beneath us.