Blowing the whistle; why do we bother with referees for job candidates?
Getting a reference from a candidate for a job is almost as deeply engrained in charity sector thinking as equal opportunities. Yet the value to the recruiting organisation is deeply questionable. Not sure you believe me? Ask yourself these two questions:
How many times have heard you of a job offer being withdrawn on the basis of references?
How many times have you told the whole truth about a candidate as a referee?
My guess is that most people reading this article will have to scratch their head and think before answering the first question and will probably say ‘on many occasions’ in answer to the second.
The psychology of references for a job is all wrong. For starters, references tend to only be taken up once the job has been offered. The referee knows this and so does the candidate. So if you think a candidate is brilliant and they are still working for you, you have a good reason to downplay their skills. If a candidate is poor and still working for you, you have a reason to say the person is wonderful. Is this a recipe for getting honest answers?
Even when a candidate is no longer working for a referee, the problems don’t disappear. From the potential employer’s point of view, a candidate gets to pick their referees, so you couldn’t expect a completely unbiased view. As a referee, I also wonder how long is too long for my views to be valid? I have done references for people I have worked with more than ten years ago. I may have thought they were great – but that was ten years ago...
To pick an example of another problem, many of our candidates for nfpSynergy’s intern programme have academics for referees. Whether somebody is brilliant at essays is not necessarily a good guide to their brilliance in the world of work.
Even if the relevance and validity of referees is overcome, another problem is that a referee knows that they are all that stands between a person and a job. What reason, what motivation could I have to say negative things about a person months or usually years after I have worked with them.
My view is that jobs are like marriages; just because one job may not have worked out doesn’t mean that all subsequent jobs won’t. So having worked with somebody, I usually feel a greater sense of allegiance to the candidate than an organisation I don’t know at all. (Of course I should make clear that most of the people I have worked with have been utterly brilliant and so I have no problem in giving them glowing references).
Even if the relevance and neutrality of a referee is sorted, then what gets asked and when it’s asked are still important.
There is no doubt that asking for references once a job offer has been made is fairly pointless. Human psychology is such that the prospective employer hears what they want to hear. I have told prospective employers some pretty strong stuff about candidates, but they still get appointed. If a job is offered subject to references, then it is as good as offered unconditionally.
What people ask for in references is often delightfully useless. I always chuckle when some I get asked to comment on people’s time-keeping, their honesty or their sickness record. Sometimes, it is even the exact dates they worked for us. Is this the information that separates the good candidates from the bad?
In contrast to the form where I am asked to rank mundane features of past colleagues’ working lives, there are the phone calls. I strongly feel that if you want my honest opinion, you need to ring me up when there are still half a dozen candidates in the running. That way, if I do have something bad to say I feel able to say it without snatching a job out of somebody’s hands when they’ve already been offered it. Equally, use LinkedIn or Facebook to see if you know somebody that has also worked with the candidate.
When I told somebody I was writing this blog, they commented ‘Isn’t it now illegal to say anything negative about somebody in a job reference’. Now that to me sounds like an urban myth*. However, it does probably represent what many people have known for some time; in very few cases does a reference ever get near the truth of anything other than brilliant candidates.
So going forward, here would be my five rules of using references:
Treat any reference from a current employer with deep scepticism
Take up references at the interview stage, not the job offer stage
Pick up the phone, don’t use a form
See if you know anybody who might not be chosen by the candidate
And sometimes, it may be better to trust in a thorough interview process including the team that the person will manage, rather than references
Could you apply our views to your own? Or do we need to call a referee in on this one? Leave us a comment below.
*Our lawyer would like to make clear I know nothing about employment law. Try https://www.gov.uk/work-reference for proper info.