Hi all,
I am working on our recruitment policy and am wondering about the part about checking references.
On a practical basis increasingly organisations are sending back informational references which don’t give any detail about performance anyway.
Also, references don’t feel they fit with an anti-oppression agenda.
However, reference checks are expected as part of due diligence processes for recruitment.
Any thoughts on this subject please?
Thanks RadHR community
from Rachel
My experience of supporting recruitment processes over the last few years has been that a candidates’ previous employers are increasingly wary (scared?) of giving references, on the basis that if a person doesn’t agree with it and they don’t get offered the job as a result, then they can sue their previous employer through a tribunal…
References have therefore become part of a wider ‘fact checking’ of details people give in their application/CV, and not a reflection of their character etc (which was their original historic purpose).
I’m picking up that to ‘fill this gap’ in understanding character, some organisations are now starting to do ‘silent interviews’ as part of recruitment: seeing what is being said about the candidate by what they post/others post about them across social media channels.
Feels a bit Orwellian in practice, but perhaps the least bad way of filling the blanks that references are now creating in recruitment processes?
We are in the US so perhaps our process is different. We do reference checks by phone call and ask about strengths/weaknesses, and very rarely does any reference say a single negative thing. It feels like due diligence at a very basic level: if the reference says anything mildly bad, or implies there was a problem, that would be a big red flag! Because candidates only offer references who they are confident will say good things.
However, one thing we feel firm on from an equity perspective: we do not Google candidates or look at their personal social media. LinkedIn and the employee page on their current org’s website are fine. Especially with more and more digital natives in the workforce, the chance that we will encounter something personal but irrelevant, that could trigger implicit bias or other negative assumptions about the candidate, does not feel fair. We also do not go “off-list” with reference checks - for example, calling a mutually-known colleague to ask about the candidate - without offering the candidate an opportunity to react to what that person said. We believe that standards of “professionalism” are subjective and may reinforce systemic disadvantages. So we stick to what they share with us directly, and their intentionally professional internet presence; we do not conduct background checks; we take the chance that someone may not be what they present, over the danger of assuming that someone’s past mistakes or personal business are relevant to their ability to the job we are hiring them for.
Hope this is helpful! Thanks RadHR for all you do!