You always put your best self on a job application, right? You’d better hope your referees agree. Image: File.
This week, a friend accidentally had a recruiter email them a copy of a referee report that their current employer had completed for them. The information was meant to be confidential, so that could have been disastrous, but luckily the feedback was all glowing in this instance.
It made me think, though, that all referee reports should be validated by the candidate. Or, at the very least, they should be critically analysed by hiring officers because the one-way process allows far too much room for misunderstanding and misrepresentation.
I’ve done a lot of reference checks for former staff, and I enjoy doing it. I have found that where a relationship hasn’t been productive with an employee, they generally don’t ask me to be their referee anyway, so the people I do give references are always ones I am very happy to support.
But I have heard and seen some pretty unfair behaviour via reference checks, especially where a former employee is criticised for something they were never made aware of when they were actually employed.
I had a former team member once apply for a role they would have been perfect for, which they then didn’t get. I wasn’t their referee, but a colleague was, whom I later met for coffee. They told me that they had been perfectly ‘honest’ in their report and noted the jobseeker’s ‘too direct’ approach to advocating for themselves and others in the organisation when needed.
What they were referring to was actually an incident where our former employee had suffered discrimination in the workplace and had gently but firmly called it out. They were never informed that their communication was seen as ‘too direct’ and so had no opportunity to respond to that criticism, which later cost them a job. Of course, they had more than one reference completed, but it only takes one negative comment to pull apart your job prospects.
On a different note, I have a former employer who actively prevents managers in the organisation from providing referee checks for current or former staff. His justification is that former staff should no longer benefit from the organisation’s time and resources (though the implication is reference checks shouldn’t even be provided on the referee’s own time) and that current staff seeking new employment shouldn’t be supported. To my mind, this is incredibly unfair and unnecessarily punitive.
Reference checks are one of the only ways new employers can get a sense of a candidate’s performance outside their own accounts, but they still leave plenty of room for bias, sabotage and inaccuracies. Surely there’s a better way to assess someone’s character and behaviour at work and their performance.
I would be more interested in hearing what a candidate’s peers had to say about them than their supervisor, as often the most productive and important relationships at work are within a team of equals, and supervisors can have little meaningful direct contact with an employee.
Regardless, my rule of thumb is that I wouldn’t say anything in a referee check that I haven’t already said to my former employee at some point – there are no surprises if there’s open communication.
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