The murky world of the job reference

It normally starts with an email.

“Hi”, it might brightly begin, even though it comes from someone in your distant working past who was at best, as far as you can remember, deeply unexceptional.

All this time later, that someone is looking for help to get a new job. A reference or an endorsement, from you.

Welcome to one of the more fraught moments in modern working life: a request to recommend someone you never rated.

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I like to think there was a time when a measure of decorum prevented such awkward demands. But if there ever was, it is over, judging from the pained conversations I have had recently with would-be referees.

“It’s a moral dilemma,” said one executive who had been repeatedly assailed by ex-colleagues he remembered for all the wrong reasons. Lazy. Untrustworthy. Ordinary. Unpleasantly demanding. The thought of helping to foist any of them on a hapless new employer was dispiriting. At the same time, he hated being rude.

In the end he did exactly what many have doubtless done in his place. Offered some friendly verbal advice and then quietly ghosted away before a request for a formal written job reference materialised.

The point is that he, like me, could not imagine being brazen enough to put such a request to a distant work contact. As he said: “I have a roster of people that I’ve had long, trusted relationships with and I just wouldn’t reach out beyond that for references.”

It’s not as if his requesters were fresh-faced graduates who lacked the time to develop that roster. Some had even more experience than him.

A letter highlighting a candidate’s ‘doggedness’, ‘diligence’, ‘obsessive punctuality’ and ability to ‘take direction well’ may thrill a boss looking for a robotic jobsworth

So what is going on? LinkedIn may not be helping. I’m told it has become more common for people to look up “connections” made on the platform, no matter how distant they are in real life, who are now working somewhere they would like to join.

If that is the case, it is in line with a wider tendency to contact total strangers on Twitter because you share a fascination with, say, 19th-century bond prices or ferrets.

There is of course another way to treat the problematic job reference request: guile. Anyone who has ever written, or read, a job reference knows there is a large difference between one that enthusiastically explains why a candidate would be perfect for a job, and one that covertly urges extreme caution.

A letter highlighting a candidate’s “doggedness”, “diligence”, “obsessive punctuality” and ability to “take direction well” may thrill a boss looking for a robotic jobsworth. It is unlikely to impress an employer seeking a creative, charming innovator with strong leaderly qualities.

This underlines a more serious problem with job references. They have a long and unhappy history of being unreliable.

A minor industry specialises in helping jobseekers ensure their old boss is not unfairly badmouthing them. One US firm offering reference-checking services claims 57 per cent of all the checks they perform reveal “some level of negativity”.

But some academic research suggests references actually tend to be excessively positive. This is mostly because applicants choose who writes them. Also, writers fear lawsuits or at least a nasty showdown if they pen an accurate but damaging letter.

Relatively little research has been done on reference checks but one study from the 1980s shows references done for job hunters who had the right to see them were more positive than those that were supposed to be confidential. It is also widely believed, if rarely proved, that unusually radiant references can be written for workers an organisation is desperate to get shot of.

For all these reasons, companies that can afford it pay considerable sums to corporate intelligence companies to check whether a candidate measures up to any references or recommendations for them.

This makes sense for very senior roles paying very large salaries. By some estimates, it can cost up to 200 per cent of the salary of a top executive to replace them.

Most companies do not have the resources to hire outside investigators. Many conduct their own checks. Some make informal inquiries. But ultimately, for all their imperfections, references are not going away any time soon.

So it is worth remembering that, quaint as it may seem, it always pays to ask someone you know and trust to do the referring. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023