Reference Checking

Hi Richard,

It is not often that I great another post with wholehearted support but I do find myself in agreement with you.

I think pre-employment checks will become more common, though I suspect the veracity of these will almost certainly leave something to be desired.

But the need for employers to gain references is an essential for the job seeker of the future, and may well begin to appear the next time there is a shortage of candidates rather than positions.

The only thing I disagree with you on is the Linkedin comment, I like reciprical references, if your subordinates don't expect a reference from you - then they aren't much cop, but I'd like to know that they are happy to testify to your abilities as well. 360 assessment just got a whole lot easier, as long as you treat every reference with the appropriate level of suspicion this is a good thing, not a bad one.

This is a very timely discussion with the realisation of predicted upturns in hiring volumes and I feel that each of these posts are very valid - I particularly support Richard and Nik's comments on the importance of assessments, and past performance not being an accurate guide to future returns.

Another issue to consider is the availability of reference-related information both now and in the future. As Tiffany stated, many HR Professionals loathe referencing and there seems to be a growing trend towards companies outsourcing this piece.

Many companies actually prevent HR or managers from providing references of any description in various parts of the world for fear of litigation and (generally speaking) supply nothing more than confirmation of employment dates and title/position.

For several years, on-line verification solutions have grown in popularity in the US and Canada to the extent that it is almost uncommon to approach a company's HR Department directly in certain sectors. This trend has been adopted in Asia Pacific fairly recently and we are beginning to see more signs of this activity in countries like the UK and South Africa too (little or no movement that I am aware of across the rest of EMEA though).

With regards to timing, Richard makes a very valid point about vetting/screening candidates to a certain extent at an early stage. The cost of hiring new staff often exceeds $10,000, so why wait until the offer stage to eliminate "bad eggs" from the process? Depending on the hiring country, either a handful or a plethora of checks would be possible, leaving just the often time-consuming and costly process of verification of employment history and academic and professional qualifications to those to whom offers of employment have been, or will be, extended.

Reference checking for me is an integral part of the hiring process. While I have a small company, I mostly use contractors with extensive backgrounds in specific areas to write business, marketing and strategic management plans. It is imperative I select people I feel I can trust and who have a record of irreproachable honesty and integrity since they will be dealing with some very sensitive proprietary information about the clients I contract with. I usually don't go to references they provide for the very reason some have already pointed out - they only provide people they have a relationship with and prep their responses to some degree. I do Google them and also get a couple of the in-depth background reports and sometimes check with some of the organizations they have worked with and have a rather in-depth personal interview with them before making a selection. While not quite an in-depth security check, I try to get as close as I can to it. I have to agree with Brenda in that the face-to-face or the next best thing a face-to-face online chat tends to reveal their honesty and integrity in how they respond. But this takes a very learned eye and some "gut feelings" to be interjected in the process. Ideally, a review of their every action or reaction to everything they have ever done would be awesome - but this is never going to happen and reliance on the "gut feelings" have a very large part in the hiring process. Another point in this subject is volume. A large organization that has an inherent large employee turn-over will have far more lenient background checking requirements than a smaller organization with few vacancies and long-term employee turn-over requirements. I like to use the food service or casino model verses that of a small scientific laboratory organization - their hiring profiles are very different and the background checking requirements are also very different. A very relevant subject given the current employment atmosphere which greatly favors the organization as few openings exist and competition for positions if very stiff. But... just my opinion.

Reference checking is crucial -- and increasingly hard to accomplish. I save my checking for final candidates. HR professionals simply find it to legally risky to speak with others about previous employees today. This leaves us with computer generated responses that, in my opinion, do not really provide sufficient feedback. Yes, we can tell if the basics are accurate -- but are left on our own to gauge some areas that are so important for small companies to be aware of (interpersonal skills, honesty, time and attendance). Perhaps my age is showing, but the true skill of reference checking was in the hesitancy or excitement in the voice, the phrasing of the response to a particular question, etc., which could tell me whether I had a winner or loser on my hands.

While they should be done and should be a critical part of the hiring process, I have never really received any information that weighed heavily on my decision of who to hire. The reality is, people will pick what I call "co-worker friends" as their references. They will prep their "references" so they can most effectively answer the questions. Most recruiters/HR professionals I know hate doing references and will only do them if it is required as part of the hiring process or if the manager requests them. I have also worked with numerous hiring managers who have never even inquired about references.

Only once did I get a bad reference and it was because an unprofessional admin asst provided me with unsolicited info when I called to speak with the candidate's former boss.

Also, we need to be extremely careful of "back-door" references which is extremely popular now because of linkedin and other social networking sites.

I think it's pretty much recognised that no-one will volunteer a referee that will provide them with a bad reference, which is why it is important to inspect the details during a reference check.

If the reference is going to be anything more than a rubber stamp, you need to check the things you discussed at interview, was a project really worth 200 million or 200 thousand? That kind of thing.

Having said that I don't think reference checks add as much value to the process as people believe, the standard disclaimer on financial products is; "past performance is no guide to future returns" or something like that, the same is true of people.

They can fail in one environment and thrive in another, try and remember that you are generally not hiring someone to do exactly the same thing as they did before but to do something different.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think there is a difference between references that external agencies conducts vs the references that HR/Recruiter conducts. External agencies as typically verifying that yes, a candidate did work for ABC Co. as a Marketing Mgr from 2005 to 2010. That type of reference does NOT tell you anything about the candidates actual job performance.

I still stand by focusing on behavioral interviewing. We must customize the questions to the position and environment and ensure interviewers truly understand how to assess the candidates responses.

As Nick stated in a previous post, sometimes, how an individuals performance is viewed is oftentimes based upon the cultural environment in which they worked. I had a boss who thought the TOP performers were those who worked 10 to 12 hr days. Those employees spent more time on E-bay and the other internet sites than working. One guy admitted to me he'd rather be at work than home. None of these TOP performers produced anything of signifigance BUT the perception was they were great because of hours they "supposedly work."

Ok, sorry for going off on a tangent.

Very interesting discussion above, but in Greece and other European countries the procedures are somehow different. Multinationals operating in Greece used to ask for references but these were not contacted.

On the other hand, the Greek labour law specifies what should appear on an employment certificate: only the start and end dates of employment and the position held. Of course, it was said above such information simply verifies the employment record not the character of the employee.

I agree that one offers as reference persons that he knows well and he has briefed about the company and the position he aspires to. The contrary would be simply not reasonable: who would offer as reference someone with whom he is not in good terms with.

As for turning to google candidates this is a practice that grows here. Employers tend to check the internet and social media to check what a candidate talks about and the most known example here is a General Secretary in public service, with very good cv, who was hired without first checking the internet and who was fired immediately fired, after it leaked in the press that in his social media accounts he was ridiculing the government.

Employers and HR managers tend to trust traditional interviewing procedures and their intuition, "gut feelings" about the honesty and character of a candidate.

As for outsourcing the reference checking, to my knowledge it is not practised here, since it might lead to legal problems since the legislation on the protection of personal data does not allow it.

From personal past experience, the interviewing of candidates in multinationals is very detailed, extensive and multi-layered. So, if something is not caught by one interviewer, it might be caught by the next. In Greece, we still trust personal impression about persons,we even have a saying for this: "A honest person needs no defendants".

Tiffany's answer really says it all. You are not really going to get good information from HR due to legal issues. Generally its start and end date, position and sometimes salary and termination or resignation. I look at references a little differently than most. While 1 or 2 references are called just to cover all the bases of standard hiring practices. I don't expect any useful information from contacting a reference. What I see from references is a. Does a person have 3-4 people that will vouch for them? and b. what is the quality of these people? Unless a person is right out of school or has another valid reason why they were not working I would expect the references to come from former business colleagues. These can be their Manager or other Managers/Directors, fellow employees, or their Direct Reports. If a person has a work history and puts down as references their friend, religious leader, and a low level employee that did not report to them at a previous company (which happens more often than I care to remember) this tells me what I need to know. I good employee (obviously depending on position and career history) should be able to put down 3-4 strong people. Of course as Tiffany said they will pick co-workers they were friends with and prep them. So I wouldn't take a positive reference as worth anything, The occasional poor reference does tell me a lot. It let's me know they don't think things through, and that they do not have good references to put down. I think a lot of times in HR we tend to miss the forest for the trees. If we would look at the big picture of who the references are it would tell us a lot more information than speaking to the reference. It's my personal opinion that fairly soon references will be done away with and "references" will be the Web, Focus.com:-), LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

"It's my personal opinion that fairly soon references will be done away with and "references" will be the Web, Focus.com:-), LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, etc."

Oh no, please say it is not so, Noah. LOL
I use Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., but if I had to depend on them for reference verification, I am in serious trouble! It may be a generational thing so I am not knocking it, but should social media really be relied upon to substantiate professional conduct/qualifications.

I'm in two minds on this Brenda, but I think that it is highly likely that for the kind of reference most people take and want that Linkedin will become acceptable in the future.

I'm Linkedin to a couple of hundred former colleagues and carry around 15 references there, it means that you can be pretty certain that I am who I say I am, I worked for the periods of time I claim to have done, and that I am not a complete lunatic. Which is pretty much all you get through a standard reference check anyway.

Up to the point at which you check references, all of the information you get on the candidate has been supplied by the candidate, so it is vital to find some external coroborating evidence as to the competences of that person.

The experience in reference checking is increasingly one of Name, Rank and Serial Number from nervous HR departments. Short of waterboarding, you are unlikely to get anything better.

My approach with client organisations is to help them conduct effective behaviourally oriented interviews, backed up with personality and ability assessments. This goes a long, long way to ensuring the effectiveness of the selection process.

When it comes to my first point, reference checking, I find interviewers too happy to accept the typically, three supplied referees. These three will be well briefed in terms of what to say and are pretty useless, unless you also adopt a behavioural approach to the discussion.

Might I also suggest an additional approach I have used and guided clients in the use of. That is to ask for referees during the screening interview. Ask the candidate to supply about 15 names, but point out that you are not going to call them all, but would prefer to be able to pick from a longer list than the one supplied.

I ask for a number of peers, subordinates, managers/supervisors and people from other departments they may have had regular contact with in the course of their work. Where relevant, I will also ask for external referees like customers or clients.

Once the candidate has gotten over the shock of trying to come up with 15 names, and I have guided them in selecting the appropriate people in a painless manner I would point out that I do not check referees in connection with their current employment, unless we are considering a job offer. But I will contact a selection of former employment referees at my own discretion.

This approach will usually get you past the HR gatekeepers and onto people who are in a position to give you a genuine reference.

I focus on assessing the candidate's achievements and character and if the conversation is going well, I will also ask for situations where all may not have gone as planned.

I am the only Cormac McGrane on the internet, so if you google my name, you will only find out about me. But not everyone is as unique as I am. You will also see that on FaceBook I am displaying a different side of me to that which you will find on LinkedIn or Focus or HR Magazine. But that is true of all people.

Beware of googling people with more common names, you can end up confused, overloaded and if you dig deep enough, you will find good reason not to hire anyone.

If you cannot manage your own reference checking an agency is much better than skipping the step. Remember, without checking references you are only relying on a single source of information and taking just your own educated gut feel into account. Two heads are better than one, but be careful about where you go to check references, information overload is not something the human brain was designed to handle.

Addendum to the above post, when I say educated gut feel, I really mean "educated" gut feel. Interviewing research shows us that selection decisions are made in the first 1-4.5 minutes of the interview. That is typically a very small portion of the time spend in the interview. So what is going on for the rest of the interview?

Usually it is the interviewer searching for information to support their decision. If they change their minds after the first 4.5 minutes it will be because they have accidentally stumbled upon something significantly ugly. In general, minor issues are written off or ignored.

The solution?

Get yourself as highly trained in selection techniques as possible.

Ensure that untrained line managers are supported by an expert who can guide them in their evaluation of the candidate.

Use employment tests, personality and ability to bring an objective measure to the process.

Ensure you fully understand the role you are hiring for and that you also understand the capability of the line manager. No point in hiring the best if the manager won't be able to get the best out of your new hire.

And on the subject of role definition, ensure it has standards and validity so you can compate candidates against expectation as against each other. It is better to go to the well again than hire the best of a bad lot.

Know yourself, be aware of your biases and learn how your decision making processes work. Get a coach or mentor if needed.

I've already covered references, but feel free to email me if you want any further guidance, or better still, ask your question here so we can share our views.

Develop a selection policy and procedure and follow it. There is nothing more guaranteed to fail than a selection process without a plan and structure.

OK, part of my 25 years experience in the area in 25 seconds reading time.

The question that I would ask is, what do you hope to gain by conducting a reference check. What information do you want to validate? How reliable is the source that you'll be contacting?

I believe like several posters that reference checks are of little to no value. That being said, there may be one exception and this just came to mind. If the interviewee provides you with several good references, you might be able to validate your own thoughts about the candidate by looking for patterns in the information that the reference share. In essence, with the right questions you might be able to discern truth from fiction. I'd use the same technique you would for behavioral interviewing with a slight twist.
At the end of the day, I'd rather rely on using a battery of tests to support my interview findings.
As social media becomes more a part of mainstream business, many have learned and will continue to learn a valuable lesson. When you post a comment or a picture on the internet, you've left your undeniable mark and it doesn't ever go away.

Background checks are very important especially in these times.Recruiters and self promotion references are not a basis for proper background checks , especially since many resumes are filled with fluff and outright falsehoods.

Predictive assesssments are helpful in this regard .These reduce the field especially when introduced with appropriate skill tests for the position .
Background checks can be discreetly done for relatively low costs by external agencies.
Check my website for more details.