The Case for References

As an executive search consultant, I’m surprised at how many of my clients deprioritize references as part of their interview process. It’s hard enough to identify and interest the right candidates, but it’s even harder to close the best of the best in a market where top talent is valued, and creating a competitive offer can be difficult. For this reason, many companies and leaders are so excited when someone completes their interview process and expresses excitement at accepting an offer that the company can afford, that they either forget to check references, or intentionally avoid them. Having coached clients to avoid this way of thinking, I want to make the case for references.??

Hiring the best person for a leadership role is better for your business than hiring the wrong person or leaving the position unfilled.??

It can be hard to justify extending a timeline for an interview process to allow yourself to run references, let alone to justify NOT hiring a good candidate because of a potentially poor reference, when it takes a long time to get this person to a final stage, or when you know there is not a good slate of backup candidates, especially when the business is suffering because a critical leadership role vacant. While it’s debatable as to what will cost your business more – leaving a position unfilled or hiring the wrong person – it is NOT debatable that making a great hire is better for your business than making the wrong hire or no hire. If your goal is to hire a great candidate that can truly drive your business, you should value references.??

Interviews are not a perfect tool for evaluating a candidate’s potential for long-term success.??

References are a great way to validate your feelings about a candidate, and to get a data point from someone that has seen them work. Candidates might spend a few hours at most interviewing with a variety of individuals at your company. If you’re the one making the hire as their future leader, you might spend 2 or 3 hours interviewing the candidate before making a final decision, while others involved in the interview process are unlikely to spend more than 1hr each. Is that really enough time to evaluate someone’s ability to have long-term, multi-year success at your company???

The ability to create a relevant resume and interview well is NOT a foolproof indicator of success in a role. While nothing you do will guarantee 100% that a candidate will have success in the role you hire them for, references give you the opportunity to talk to people who HAVE worked with the individual from a long-term perspective. You might have a good sense of how successful someone will be from your 1-on-1 interviews alone, but having those assumptions validated by someone that has worked with the candidate for years, rather than simply talked to them for a couple hours, will always be valuable.??

How to Weigh References??

When considering how to weigh a reference in comparison to other aspects of a candidate such as how they interview or their previous experience, there is no hard and fast rule. In some cases, a great reference from the right person might be enough to convince you that a candidate is the right person for the job, even if they did not blow you away during the interview. Conversely, a negative reference where the feedback may not be relevant to the role you are hiring for (I.e. you are hiring a sales leader for an individual contributor, revenue generation focused role, but their former boss doesn’t speak highly of their management capabilities), may not be enough to sway you one way or the other.??

If a candidate provides you with professional references that are negative about their experience with that individual, that is a pretty big red flag regardless of context. When a candidate is able to hand-pick who they let you talk to from their previous roles, they should know how to pick people who they worked well with. An inability to provide positive references means they either don’t have the EQ to understand what former coworkers thought of them, or that they simply have not made enough positive impressions to have positive references in the first place. Either way, this should be a red flag.??

References shouldn’t be the only data point used to making hiring decisions, but they are always a valuable data point to consider.??