References Should Not Be a Part of the Candidate Evaluation Process

When you contact a reference to get a psycho-social-technical picture of Bob, you implicitly believe that his past behavior predicts his future behavior.

But this assumption is not easy to assure.

Not only do references make assumptions about one time being equal to another and hence useful in judging employability, they assume that person X in environment A will behave the same in environment B.

Environment is a huge factor is behavior. What sense does it make for a multinational mega-corporation to take a reference at a former job where 3 guys worked in a basement?

Let's take Billy Joel. He was a fish out of water in Los Angeles. The unappealing Billy Joel you would get a reference report on from his Los Angeles days tells you nothing about his potential in a New York gig.

Co-workers A and B may not like each other very much, but perhaps they are willing to put that aside so they each can get a job.

Oracle, for example, has a policy that its employees will not give references to former employees. The extent of referent information is employment verification via Human Resources: they will disclose manager name, salary, and duration and location of employment. I worked at Oracle. I can't get a character or technical reference from them. I love the skeptical looks I get when I try to explain this to people. Perhaps the fact that the 2nd largest software company in this nation does not do references should give you an idea that references may not be such a good idea after all.

Most of the people I have worked for see time as money and do not want to spend time on something that does not yield money, i.e., talking on the phone with someone to give a reference. A typical job search might involve applying to four to eight places. 15 minutes per reference phone call means 1-2 hours out of each references work week during a typical job search. Your reference (and his boss) will love you for taking up his time. A contractor might change jobs every six months. Do you think potential references savor answering the same questions every six months for no financial kickback? I don't think so.

I worked during the dot-com era. That's 3 years worth of references that I will never be able to resource because all of those people have bitten the dust. I guess that makes me a bad person.

If you worked for a bad boss, then what? As an extreme example, assume that Martin Luther King's past 3 employers were closet white supremacists. Would he ever get a good reference? Probably not. But that doesn't mean that he is a bad person.

The jobseeker is changing jobs because there was a mismatch between employer and employee. When there is a difference between two people (a) one must be very sure of how the former employer handles difference (b) one must be very sure that the former employer was different and more skilled not less.

Albert Einstein seeking job references exemplifies both point (a) and (b). Let's assume that Albert Einstein left a position at a government aerospace company because he felt bored and uncomfortable around his peers. More than likely, he left on bad terms because he dressed poorly, communicated poorly and did not document all the steps in his problem solving. Regarding point (a), perhaps his co-workers did not tolerate difference well. In this case, they would evaluate Einstein negatively due to their own psychological configuration (which includes perhaps an unhealthy degree of self-centeredness).

Regarding point (b), it is a shame when less capable minds have an opportunity to evaluate great minds and this is exactly what could happen in this case. Einstein probably had more intelligence in his kneecaps than everyone else in the company combined. They simply could not see the brilliance of Einstein because they were trapped in the dark recesses of their own incapability. If a recruiter takes the words of these in-the-box drones, then a very capable out-of-the box genius gets is seen as a poor job candidate.

Let's assume that Person X has worked for 7 companies and let's say that at at 4 of the companies he was a complete flop, terror, failure, whatever. But let's say that he did well at the other 3. And let's say he is savvy enough to provide references at only those 3. Or worse, let's say he was good at only 2 jobs, but he uses 2 refs from 1 job and another from the other.

So you get the impression that he is an angel based on limited data… and you are happy… and he is happy to go along with the parade as well.

I am currently in an interesting situation at work. I have a boss who is of Latin origin. This means two things. First his cultural assumptions are different from mine. Second, his command of English is non-standard and in some cases, weak. These differences have led to many serious communication breakdowns, sometimes not surfacing until 1 or 2 weeks later.

Now, let's say that you want to call him for a reference. Now, in response to your questions about my ability to convey ideas, it is very possible that my current boss might say: "Terrence doesn't listen to directions well" or he might say: "Terrence doesn't communicate effectively" … in other words, he might point the finger at me even though one could argue that the issue is with him.

So now we see another flaw in the reference process. Most individuals have an instinctive urge to protect their self-image. Without a detailed personality profile on the person giving the reference, you don't know what the person is saying when she says what she says. In other words, you have inadequate contextual background on the person supplying the reference to interpret his statements about me and therefore should not attempt to do so.

Have you noticed that no references are required for admission to the Armed Forces? This is because the Armed Forces have complete confidence in their ability to train a person. A company begging for references is showing lack of agility in commandeering any and every resource.

If you want to know how good I am technically, break out the appropriate technical test.

Some people like to say that they like to talk to a reference and read between the lines of what the reference is saying. What happens if my former boss is not a native English speaker? They won't be able to glean all the subtle cues from his speech that they would from a native English speaker. Am I to suffer because someone else had a boss that could provide you with more touchy-feely information?

You may contact my former employers after I have a contract for the sole purpose of verifying objective information such as salary and dates of employment. You may not contact my former employers to get an idea of how good an employee I was because, as this paper has shown, the reference process is a severly flawed way to do this.

These stories show the problems with the reference process.

I will never forget when I was contacted for a position at [Health Market Science](http://www.healthmarketscience.com/index.html) in King of Prussia, PA. They liked my resume but insisted on speaking to 3 references before bringing me in for a personal interview. At first I said no, but then gave in because this was January 2002 and jobs were scarce. So they called up my references and my references gave me a glowing review. So they bring me in for a job interview and I pass their technical questions. However, even though the job req had no Java on it, they mention that they will be reimplementing some Perl stuff in Java at which point I say I will not do Java.

They conclude the interview by saying they want me to write some code to scrape some websites they will need to cull data from. Then they tell me to email them the code. After they get the code, they pass on me with the excuse that I am not interesting in programming in Java ( which was not on their job requirement). My references' time was wasted because they did not evaluate me first.

I cannot allow this to happen again.

This is a story that a friend of mine related to me: I did not use a reference from my last job even though I had been there for five years. Near the end of my tenure there, a manager was brought in who made a number of fault decisions. I noticed all my co-workers lining up to brown-nose the new manager and trying to one-up me in front of him.

I can relate to this story because a similar thing happened to me. I was working at a dot-com, having a good time when all of a sudden the CEO gets the bright idea to hire a CIO. So in comes this guy with his shirt and tie and SAP notebook --- a complete wrong fit for a dot-com tech department.