Reference Ace › Guides › Paying someone to be your referee in NZ: the rules
Whether money changes hands legally, and what the money can and cannot buy.
Nobody blinks at paying a career coach, a CV writer, or a service to brief your referees. Money is not the issue.
A referee. The moment someone is paid to say things about you that they did not experience, they are not a referee, they are an actor, and the performance is a deception.
Finding referees you have overlooked, writing the brief, running the practice check, and scripting the current-employer consent line. Pay for the preparation, never the pretence.
If they genuinely worked with you and would say true things anyway, a thank-you is fine. If the payment buys a better story than the truth, the deception is the problem, not the dollars.
Coaching, briefing and practice checks are completely legal. Services impersonating referees are not.
The work check, the brief pack, the practice check and the scripts. When we speak to a prospective employer it is only ever as ourselves: an independent reviewer who says you paid and exactly what we checked. That is precisely why the result holds up.
Reference Ace checks real examples of your work, confirms they're yours, and vouches for them to employers by name, always as an independent reviewer and never as a former boss. Got a referee already? We brief them and run the practice check before a real employer calls.
See how it works and pricing