Throughout the interview process, one of the most important things to do prior to a structured interview or immediately following it is to check a candidate’s references. While interviewing a candidate, it is very important to make sure that the structured interview format you are using tries to see if their personality matches the characteristics provided in their resume. Unfortunately, interviewer skills and techniques cannot always discern the true personality or success of a candidate.
Reference Checking
Selecting the best candidate for a position is a bit like the forensic investigation of a crime scene in that the investigators (in this case you, the interviewer) have to piece together bits of evidence in order to draw reasonable conclusions about what happened and who did it. In selecting employees, the process involves assembling facts about an applicant’s past in order to make a prediction about performance in the future. A key component of this fact-finding is reference checking, which for our purposes in this Program includes more than simple verification of employment, salary, and educational credentials.
From the perspective of getting a complete picture of a candidate, reference checking makes good sense. However, there is a legal reason for checking references. Companies have been sued under the concept of Negligent Hiring for failing to make a “reasonable effort” to check references, which resulted in the organization hiring a person with a violent background who then caused injury to an employee, customer, or vendor. Whenever I present the concept of Negligent Hiring, I often receive the following responses:
- “You can’t get references today. The only things that former employers provide are dates of employment and positions held.” or
- “Nobody is going to give you negative information in a reference check.”
Well, both of these statements have a degree of truth to them, but that does not mean that you can’t protect your organization if you know what to ask.
Becoming a great interviewer takes time, and interviewer skills that work often take a long time to develop. By reference checking all of your candidates that are seriously being considered for a position, you will have great interviewer techniques starting to develop from your first interview.
