On hiring: why most reference checks are absolutely useless
How to start asking the right questions to the right people (and the one thing you should never, ever do)
A quick LinkedIn search of Huckletree yields 329 people results which means that I’ve probably hired around that many people over the past 10 years. In the early days I recruited everyone myself, laboriously reaching out to people on LinkedIn until they agreed to an interview. These days I’m involved in the recruitment of middle management up to leadership team level and I’m better at the whole process than I was 10 years ago, having learned a lesson or two.
This said, I think that the whole recruitment process is broken. I find it hard to learn anything meaningful about the true character of a person at interview stage. Many people (especially sales people) know how to charm you and oversell themselves, and often the very best talent don’t know how to sell themselves at all. Someone’s most recent job title doesn’t mean much either as startups often inflate titles in order to win talent. So an interview tells you nothing, a job title means nothing and a recruiter (more often than not) simply wants to make the placement.
I’m dying for someone to come along with a solution that allows you to really know who you’re hiring before you make the decision to ask them to join your company. For now however, we need to do our best with the tools available to us and one of those tools is the reference check.
Our dear friend, the reference check.
Issued proudly by the very candidate you’re trying to dish the dirt on, a mythical list of people promising to give you truthful insights into a person vying for a role with you. Can this ever be more a list of people the candidate knows will speak positively about them? Further, you ask them the same pointless questions you always ask on reference calls… and the mythical unicorns give you low depth, low quality answers.
Put yourselves in the shoes of the person giving you the reference. Why would they say anything bad about the candidate - what’s the upside? So every candidate is great, totally hireable and would be hired back in an instance if the referee had the chance. And hey, you’re busy! In fact, you’re so desperate to fill the position and get back to your actual work that what you hear reinforces what your subconscious wants to believe and Boom! You hire the candidate.
Yeah.. it’s pretty broken. So stop doing it! Stop wasting 30 minutes of your life on shitty reference calls that don’t help you at all and start asking the right questions, to the right people. Let me tell you how.
