The Critical Step Necessary to Avoid Painful Hiring Mistakes

If you want to avoid painful hiring mistakes, do not skip the critical step of conducting high-quality, high-touch reference interviews. Failing to do so can leave huge value on the table.

Here are the top four reasons why references are so important:

1. They verify the information you’ve gathered in interviews. It doesn’t happen often, but candidates can and do share misleading information at times. Reference checks provide a critical backstop.

2. They can reveal blind spots. Even the best interviewers in the world can’t unlock information that the candidate is fundamentally unaware of. Sometimes you need a third party’s perspective to see the whole picture.

3. They can be powerful onboarding tools. Every candidate is going to come with some risks and development areas, and it can be enormously powerful to discuss them openly with new hires during onboarding. Sharing these insights from references (in a sufficiently supportive and confidential manner) is more powerful than simply playing back what the candidate told you in interviews.

4. They keep future candidates honest. Word gets out! If you have a reputation for doing high-quality, thorough references, candidates will know it. They are more likely to share their stories honestly when they know there will be follow-ups.

Guess what? It’s possible to conduct references and still fail to capture all of these sources of value.

Here are the most common mistakes we see companies make when talking to references:

1. They let third parties (for example, recruiters) do the references. If you are paying someone to source candidates, that person (or firm) has an understandable incentive to get the seat filled. This can compromise the depth and rigor of references. These interactions are some of the most important ones in your process. Take it personally!

2. The conversations are skin deep. References are sometimes wary of sharing their concerns or reservations about a candidate because they may perceive the downside risk to be greater than the upside. Make sure you set up ample time for the conversation, and ask about the positives as well as the negatives in an engaging, high-rapport manner. If you ask questions openly and confidently, you are far more likely to get insightful, balanced information.

3. They lead the witness. Many hiring managers barge straight into the conversation broadcasting their perspective on the candidate (usually the positives) and then ask the reference for validation. This can skew the reference’s response and lead to confirmation bias. Instead, keep the discussion open-ended and seek explicit verifications only toward the end of the call. 

4. They take the candidate’s list at face value. Even marginal performers can find former coworkers to vouch for them. Be skeptical of reference lists that don’t include recent supervisory figures. Better yet, let the candidate know who you want to speak with and let them put you in touch.

Once you’re on a call with a key reference and have thanked them for their time, we recommend starting by verifying the nature of their relationship with the candidate. Thereafter you can elicit the reference’s open-ended (“unaided”) thoughts on the candidate’s greatest strengths and development areas, asking in multiple ways. But where to go from here?

Here is a great tactic that can hugely increase the insight you gather from reference checks

Two words: Get quantitative.

After the open-ended feedback, just say the following:

“I’d love to add some quantitative feedback into the mix. I’ll share a list of skills or competencies, and I’d love to hear how you would rate [candidate X] on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is ‘the best you have ever seen’ and 1 is ‘the worst.’”

You can tweak the above as you see fit, but the key points are to 1) introduce this section explicitly and 2) define what your rating scale means. Be sure to hold a very high bar for a 10.

Now you are ready to run through a list of key skills and competencies one by one, asking the reference to rate the candidate on each. We suggest you have six to 10 items on your list, plus an overall rating of the candidate at the end.

What quantitative feedback should look like when performing reference checks

Here are our guiding principles for creating a list of key skills and competencies to help you gather quantitative feedback:

1. Focus only on skills and competencies that matter for the role.

2. Aim for variety in your list, including hard and technical skills, leadership qualities, and interpersonal traits. Why? Because this often prompts the reference to recall additional skills (or gaps) that they didn’t mention in the open-ended feedback.

3. Be sure to include items where your interviews revealed potential concerns or uncertainties.

4. Don’t forget to include some skills and competencies where you know your candidate is strong. This ensures balance and helps you calibrate the reference’s rating scale.

If you have interviewed well, most of the ratings should not be particularly surprising. But some will be. If you get ratings from a reference that are higher or lower than you expected, flag them as you run through your list. When you get to the end, just ask the reference to tell you more about each of those items, without revealing your “surprise,” of course.

A final point: We do not recommend being too rigid or algorithmic with the ratings themselves (for example, “all references must give ratings of X or above”). People are different. Cultures are different. Use your judgment.

The real reason we like this approach is because it greatly increases the breadth of the information you gather in references and allows you to explore potential problem areas without being too heavy-handed.