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Never, never use a referee who you are not certain is going to be fully singing your praises. If youre unsure about any of the referees you're using, set up a
by anexprogrammer 10y ago
Never, never use a referee who you are not certain is going to be fully singing your praises.
If youre unsure about any of the referees you're using, set up a fake opportunty via friends and spoofed emails etc. Get real references, which of course are sent to you, or relayed if a friend phones "as a headhunter/employer".
There's also a distinct possiblilty that the referee had been hassled at a bad moment by the headhunter (not a species reknowned for consideration after all). The mixed part may have stemmed from this. Or perhaps he didn't cooperate in sharing leads at his current location. It might have been poor wording or misunderstanding either a question or answer rather than a real issue.
In short, you'll never know, but you can arm yourself better for next time.
- adnam 10y agomisunderstood - deleted :)
- sithadmin 10y agoHe's arguing that a fake job opportunity - which provides an opportunity to vet references - should be set up, not that references should be faked.
- LitFan 10y agoThe suggestion was to set up a fake job opportunity, and to collect real references - an attempt to find out who gave a mixed reference.
- anexprogrammer 10y agoI'm not suggestng you fake references. I'm suggesting he find out what referees have to say, by getting a friend to ask them for a reference. There is nothing dishonest about finding out what a potential referee has to say about you, and how. It's certainly no more dishonest than the hundreds of agents who try to insist on references before interviews - because they're using them for lead generation. If it's an ex-employer, as many are, it's not unheard of for them to give minimal or less than glowing reference simply because theyre still unhappy you left and nothing to do with your skills and personality. To use a referee without being as sure you're using the best names from the possibles is foolish.
- adnam 10y agoAh I see, sorry then. I'll remove my comment as I misunderstood and it's not relevant.
- wallace_f 10y agoHow would he even be caught, to be honest? Anyways, even if legitimate, I always assume most references are friends, friends-of-friends, or friends of family, or something making the reference equally meaningless, anyways. I know very well of a situation that I think most people would not believe. A well-established software company hired someone with excellent, glowing references from real people at one of the largest software companies in the world. This was for a senior QA position. After months, it came to light that the person did not even have the capability to tell you if the code they were looking at was javascript, C# or VB code. They just had never done any coding or technical work in their career. So granted, during the hiring process there was almost no consideration of testing their coding knowledge because the person wasn't really hired to write any code, and the company doing the hiring was unbelievably incompetent; but even still, it was just amazing this happened. Not the same thing but pretty close: I read an article, and I can't find it now, but I think it was UC Berkeley published something saying that reference quality for admitted students was a meaningless or near-meaningless predictor of academic success at their institution. I assume the same in the working world, unless I personally know the reference.
- convolvatron 10y agoon the contrary. you give references for people who have the deepest understanding of how you work - how you excel and how you fail. the whole system works much better when everyone is as well informed as possible.