The Reference Check Racket!

Today we're breaking down why the reference check is mostly performance, who it quietly disadvantages, and what actually predicts whether someone will be good at a job. Spoiler: this ain't it!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome back to We Lead Anyway. I'm Noelle, senior leader, career coach, and host of podcast We Lead Anyway. I'm enjoying the most wonderful cup of coffee. It's Pete's coffee. And no, this isn't a paid promotion. It's just so yummy and delicious right now that I had to actually say it out loud. Thank you for listening. All right. So today I want to talk about the most universally accepted rituals in the hiring process. Something that some candidates probably dread. Every recruiter swears by, and almost nobody has stopped to actually examine. If you said reference check, you would be correct. Now, on the surface, reference checks, I mean, they sound reasonable. You want to you want to hire someone, so you call a few people who worked with them and you ask questions, you get some insight. Totally logical. Very sensible. I dig it. Except, stay with me here. The way references work in practice is actually completely divorced from the reasonable sounding premise. Because they're a formality. It's a box that gets checked. And HR can say, listen, I did my due diligence even when the process produces literally zero useful information. And in the meantime, it's quality, it's quietly, okay, I haven't had enough coffee this morning. It's quietly, systematically disadvantageous to the exact people who most need a fair shot. All right, let's just walk through what a reference check actually looks like. Because when you say it out loud, I don't know it gets a little funny. A company has decided they want to hire you. They're excited. They've done the interviews. You crush the interviews. The team loves you. You love the team. Now they just need to do references. So they ask you, the person who they already fell in love with and are about to hire, to provide a list of people who will say good things about you. What? They're asking you to curate the list of people who will evaluate you, the candidate. You get to choose your own jury. Now, who are you going to put on that list? Because back in the day, I literally put my mother on that list. May she rest in peace. But seriously, good looking, Atma. Of course, you're going to put down the people who think you're great. The former boss who mentored you, or the colleague who's been your friend for 10 years. The person who already told you that they'd give you a glowing reference. And then the hiring manager calls those people. And oh, surprise, they say great things about you. And everyone acts like this information is useful. Actually, everyone acts like this is information. You met me and you thought I was great, and I'm telling you that I'm great. And then my chosen advocates are also telling you that I'm great. It is not information. This is simply performance where everyone already knows their lines. And the outcomes, it was never really in question. The only way a reference check reveals something genuinely surprising is if a candidate, whoopsie, makes a catastrophic error in the judgment about who they put on the list, which occasionally does happen. But that's not the system working. That's that's actually a mistake. So we've built this entire mandatory step in the hiring process around catching the occasional catastrophic mistake while doing almost nothing useful for the other 99% of the candidates. Great system. Now, all right, I'll start being, I'll stop being snarky right now because the reference check, the system isn't just inefficient. It can be inequitable. And I want to be specific about who pays the price. For example, people who left toxic workplaces, and you know those places. We all have seen them. The ones where leaving was the right call, maybe the only call, but where your manager took it personally and would absolutely tank your reference if given the chance. These people are now in an impossible situation. They can't use their most recent employer. They have to now go further back or get creative and explain why, which opens up a whole other conversation that they might not want to have. Or you get a group of people who don't have a strong professional network. And I want to be honest about who that often is. Sometimes there's people who are newer to this country who deserve a fair shake. They come from industries or backgrounds where networking wasn't the norm. People who were focused on doing the work rather than cultivating relationships with senior people who could later advocate for them. Reference checks don't measure competence, they just measure access. And access is not always evenly distributed. And there are there's a dozen more groups, right? But you get the gist. The reference check, as currently designed, is not a merit filter, it's a network filter. And those are not the same thing. And here's the piece that we don't really think about what the references are actually allowed to say. Because most companies have legal policies that restrict what a former employee can disclose during a reference check. In most cases, HR will confirm nothing beyond your job title, your dates of employment, and whether or not you're eligible for rehire. That's it. That's the whole reference. But in industries like education, they will talk about your mama. They will talk about how ugly your kids are and that you had a horrible singing voice and your worst mistake and why you should never be hired again in the country. So you have hiring managers, calling references, expecting insight. And what they're actually getting is a legally sanitized non-answer. Yes, she worked here from 1918 to 1922. Yes, she's eligible for rehire. Cool. Super useful. Really glad we did this. The reason companies do this is liability. If a former employer says something negative that cost you a job, you could potentially sue them. So most companies have learned to say nothing, which means the reference check, which was supposed to protect the hiring company from a bad information, now produces almost no information at all. And we keep doing it. Every single hire. Because stopping would feel irresponsible, even though the process itself has largely become an expensive, time-consuming formality that mostly just delays start dates and really just stresses candidates out. So what could companies do instead? Because I'm not just here to complain. I generally want to see hiring get better. Skills-based assessments. Oh, I know some of y'all hate them. I actually hate them, but it works. Work samples, trial projects, paid ones, by the way, not free labor disguised as evaluation. Structured interviews where every candidate every candidate gets asked the same questions and answers are scored consistently. These things actually predict job performance. References largely do not. And if you're going to do references, do them differently. Don't just call people on the list. Ask the candidate for a peer, not just a manager, but someone, you know, a colleague that they have didn't get along with. Ask open-ended questions to that colleague that require more than a glowing endorsement. What kind of environment does this person thrive in? What's the situation where they struggled and how do they handle it? Those questions are so much harder to script in advance. And for job seekers, know your rights. In most places, a former employer cannot legally say anything defamatory about you. If you're worried about a bad reference, you can actually call your former employees HR and just ask what they'll say. It's a reference check on your reference check. Start building relationships now, not just when you need them. I know it sounds like generic networking advice, but in a system, in a system that rewards access, having people in your corner before you're desperate is genuinely just proactive and protective. So listen, reference checks, unfortunately, aren't going away anytime soon. They're too embedded in the process, too comfortable for hiring managers, and they're just easy to defend, even though they don't work. But we can at least call it what it is. It's not the rigorous vetting process that we all have come to believe. Just a ritual, a performance of due diligence that most can mostly confirms what the hiring team already decided. And in the meantime, it puts a real unnecessary burden on people who can least afford it. The career changers, the people escaping bad situations, the ones who didn't spend their 20s collecting the right LinkedIn connections. They deserve better than a system that was not useful. All right, that's all I've got for today. If you've got a reference check horror story, either as a candidate or as someone who's been asked to give one, I want to hear it. Email me at noelle leadsanyway at gmail.com. And if you're interested in personal or professional coaching and development, visit leadwithnoelle.com. Until next time, go take up space.