EP08 - The Importance of Reference Checking in Recruitment

 In this episode of the Recruitment People Podcast, Kelly Charity delves into the essential yet often overlooked aspect of reference checking. With over two decades of recruitment experience, Kelly breaks down the do's and don'ts, legalities, and strategies for conducting thorough and effective reference checks. Learn why reference checks are crucial, how to handle tricky situations, and the importance of verifying referees. Whether you're an employer or a candidate, this episode equips you with the knowledge to navigate reference checks confidently. Tune in to uncover the secrets of successful reference checking and ensure you make informed hiring decisions. 

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  Welcome to the Recruitment People podcast, the place where employers and candidates unite to uncover the art of successful recruitment. Hi, I'm Kelly Charity, a recruiter and agency owner with over two decades of recruitment experience. In this podcast series, I'm going to dive deep into the heart of hiring and job seeking, sharing actionable insights.

And of course, a little bit of fun along the way, whether you're looking to sharpen your hiring practices or navigate your career path, we've got you covered. So let's get started and unlock the secrets to recruitment success together. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the recruitment people podcast today.

We're going to pull apart the critical yet. often difficult task of reference checking. Now, this episode is going to unpack the do's and don'ts, uh, the legalities involved and reveal why recruitment agencies are particularly skilled at conducting thorough and effective reference checks on your behalf.

Kelly Charity, the owner of The Recruitment People is here once again. Thanks for joining me. Hi, Adam. Thank you for having me. Excellent. Now, look, this is probably something that, uh, people have been doing for generations in terms of reference checking people who they want to want to put on. And it's probably gone through some, a lot of changes I would imagine, you know, with red tape and things that have happened.

So let's really unpack this and talk about reference checking. Cause it's what you guys are experts at along with everything else in the recruitment process. But let's start by explaining. How crucial is reference checking, you know, once you've done the rest of the recruitment process? Really, really important.

So we've recently, for example, had a client say to us, you still reference check? Is that even a thing? I'm like, yeah, it's so important. So it's so important because Even though you, most people assume that nobody's going to put a referee on their resume that they think is going to give a bad reference, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So, and that is probably the case. However, what happens is that when we get to the final stage of the process, which is reference check in, we then dig a little deeper. So we're saying to the Candidate and potential employee. Okay. Who is this? Who is this reference? And then all sorts of things start coming out.

Oh, it's my mate. Oh, it's somebody I worked with 10 years ago. Oh, it's, it's my client. Um, we're like, no, we need to speak with your current employer. The manager, who did you report to? I can't give you that information because, well, you know, I prefer to give you my colleague. There's your alarm bell. Yep. Why will your previous manager not give you a reference?

Look, sometimes there are situations where Something's happened. Personality clash. Okay. Let's go to your previous employer. Oh, well, you know, he's fallen off the face of the earth. No, we can find people on LinkedIn. Now, if you've not got their phone number, let's reach out to them in a different way. The world is much smaller.

You know, we can find people. So these sorts of questions alone. Alarm bells. Red flags. Red flags. Right. So unless somebody has an absolute valid reason, which we would share with our, you know, the client, the employer, as to why we can't get certain references, it's kind of up to the employer to sort of make that judgment call if there's an issue.

But it's an alarm bell to me. Why? You know? Sure. But Let me play devil's advocate here. Could there be a scenario where they want to be able to give you their current manager, but they want to be sure that they're going to actually get the job because, you know, they go and give this manager who then knows they're looking knows they're about to Potentially be offered a job, they end up not getting it and have ramifications.

This is why this is such a tricky thing. It is, it is. Look in that situation, if the current employer didn't know that they were looking, we might ask for somebody within this, in that organization, but not the manager, maybe a different manager that perhaps they trust, have a relationship with. They might be able to get one.

They might not, might, might be able to ask for a colleague. So we can confirm they're working there. And that, you know, the, the things that they've said and what job they're doing is correct. Then we would get the previous employer. And if there's no alarm bells with the previous employer, then the offer would be made subject to the final reference check once they'd handed in the notice.

So that's the way you get past this, because I was going to say, is it a reasonable question from a candidate to say, yeah, I can do this, but I want to be guaranteed I'm going to be getting the job as long as the ref and that, so you can make the offer subject and that's the way you get around that. And again, that, that raises again, some alarm bells sometimes because when you say to a candidate, a potential employee, employer, employee, sorry, when you say to them, okay, so the offer is subject to the final reference check with your current employer.

When you've left there, if there's an issue, they know that they're going to have handed in their notice. For the issue to then be raised. Yep. So they're going to go, Oh, well, actually then there's already an issue. So it all comes out before, do you know what I mean? So it's so important to do the reference checks because asking for references and not following through is kind of, you know, if there's a dodgy candidate, they're going to go, I'll take my chances.

Nobody does reference checks. As a recruiter, we have to do reference checks, so they can't get away with it with the recruiter. But with an employer, employers sometimes don't have time, particularly smaller businesses. They go on gut, they like you, you like them, we'll just take them. And then they turn out to be You know, a complete dud or, you know, so yeah, it's so, so important.

Well, talk me through the process. How is it done these days? Do you reach out by email? Do you phone them? And, and then I want to go through a few of the do's and don'ts. Okay. So generally we'll do verbal references because we get a lot more information from a verbal reference, but sometimes, you know, the, the, the referee will say, can you send me an email?

So we have no choice. We have standard questions that we ask. It's quite in depth. We do get some pushback sometimes on the length of the reference and then they might choose to call us rather than do it, do it themselves in writing. But we do references after the interview with the clients. The clients say, yeah, I'm really happy with the candidate.

We're going to go to reference stage now. Once we start doing the references, we can say to the client, a potential employer, is there anything. That came up in the interview with you that you were unsure of, because we can put this into our reference questions. So they might say, Oh, I was unsure about the relationships with the clients that they're reaching out to and whether they're existing or whether they're, you know, all brand new business development, for example.

So when we do the reference check. We can then just push a little further and a little deeper into the situation. Get the answer on that particular issue. Oh, I feel like they were, they're slightly, you know, aggressive. Can you see if there's been a situation? I feel like there was a situation and they didn't tell me too much about that.

Can you, you know, just find out, was there a situation? So it's a great way to, to plug gaps from, from the, from the interview as well. Oh geez, I would never have thought of that. Okay, so you've got them on the, on the phone, you've got a process to go through, what are the do's and don'ts of, of a, of a reference check?

What, what should you be doing and are there, are there any things that you should avoid doing? Okay, so what you should be doing and what we do is we dig deep. So you know, our resources that do the reference checking, you know, they want to know what do you mean by that? So, it's not enough for the employer to say, Yeah, they got on with their colleagues okay.

What do you mean by that? What do you mean by okay? We need more than that. Yep. Because we're writing this down. So, when, when our client reads that, they're going to say to us, What do you mean by they were okay? Yep. So we need to have that answer. So we dig very, very deep in the references to make sure we understand exactly what the referee means by anything they say that might be a little bit ambiguous.

Sure. When it's read, you know, you can read body language. Oh yeah, they were okay. They were, that's kind of, Oh yeah, they were okay. Yeah. They got on with everyone. Like, so you kind of reading that as actually there's not an issue, but if they're like, Yeah, they were okay. Mm, they've said the same thing, but different tones can mean totally different things.

Yeah, so listening, hearing, and then digging deeper on whatever that might look like. No, other than that, there's no really, you know, it is just about listening. So there's no don'ts. Sure. There's just do's. Push more, ask more, ask open questions. Don't, don't, don't. Just take surface level answers. Correct, yeah.

Okay. What do you do when you get, because this was a thing a while ago, I don't know whether it's still a thing, whether it's something you've come up against, where an employer just through want of not wanting to say, Anything just says, look, I can, I can confirm when they were here. Basically just, I don't know what they call that, but they just basically say, I can confirm they worked here from here and here and they were satisfactory.

Yes. Because they don't want to say anything else because they're, they're scared of the ramifications of whatever it is. Yes. How do you deal with that? Okay. So we try and appeal to their better nature. I understand they say, oh, it's not company policy or, you know, these sorts of things and people do get scared that there's going to be some.

Come back or, but for me, I think sometimes that's a bit of an alarm bell too, because if you worked with someone and they were your subordinate and they asked for a reference, you'd say something nice. Even if you say, look, I company policy is they, we don't give reference. I can confirm they worked here.

They were fabulous. I would re employ. Yep. That's enough. You don't need to answer all the questions, but you can give something. Sure. If you're flat out refusing to give anything, I'm going to try and push and appeal to their better nature to just understand, and they might tell me something off the record, perhaps as a recruiter to just say, listen, don't, don't go there, et cetera.

How, how often? I would imagine it, it's pretty rare that you get to reference check stage, you've done everything else and it falls over there for whatever reason. Is it rare? Does it happen a lot? It does happen. It does? It does. It doesn't happen a lot because what we've learned to do is we've learned to manage the candidate's expectations.

So we're saying to the candidate, this is our process. You're going to have to provide me with two referees and they're going to need to be your current employer and your previous employer Before we've even kind of started going into the whole interview shortlist, you know We're telling them what needs to come at that point.

They start to have that conversation say oh, well actually, I'm not going to be able to provide that because And then we're going, we've already got a problem. So we can, we can sort of thrash that out at the beginning and say, okay, let me speak to the client, you know, so we know there's an issue, but we've kind of got reasons why, and that's okay.

The client's happy with that. As long as we've doubled the information to the employer and they're happy to accept, we can't get the current cause there's a personality clash. We know it's going to be bad. Let's go to previous, previous and previous. Then that's okay. But if you're looking at 10 years ago.

Because the last six employers are not going to give you a reference. There's a problem. Yep. And as the recruiter, I'm going to say, what's the issue? I need to know what is the issue here because my client is paying me to find you and I need to know what the issues are. And then the candidate does start to open up and say, Oh, there's an issue or, you know, and we have that open conversation, which is, which is great because we can work with that.

But don't just lie or, you know. What strategies do you use to verify the authenticity of the, the referees that you are contacting? Because I'm sure you've had candidates try to pull the wool over your eyes. Yes, we do. So we go on LinkedIn and check the person. We also look at for the email, the email address.

We want confirmation of, you know, there is in that current job, there does need to be something. We've gone back and asked for, you know, some kind of letterhead To like, if, if that referee's left the business, we need something to prove they work there. LinkedIn generally will give us what we need these days, but, but we have to verify that the referee is, you know, is right.

Even if we get a reference that's sorry, the candidate has given us a written reference from their previous employer. Yep. I'm still going to verify that they, that the referee actually wrote that, not the candidate wrote that on the letterhead before they left. So we still do some kind of verification on that.

We did have a situation previously, which just goes to show how important it is to do that. Because we had a guy who was going in as a sales manager. into a company. And when we got to the reference check in stage, he gave them no issues. There was no alarm bells at all. The guy was perfect and the client thought he was perfect.

And we got to the reference check in stage and he gave me the referee who was his manager, who was the sales director of the previous company he worked for. Wow. When we looked on LinkedIn, that person was not the sales director. So I'm like, this is interesting. And so I thought I'm just going to do a bit more digging here.

There's situation. And so we Googled the telephone number of the candidate because that particular candidate wasn't on any social media platform that I could find, which is a little interesting this day and age, but some people don't like it. So that's fine. But so I Googled the phone number of. His mobile number and it brought up a business that was in direct competition with the company that we were recruiting for.

And so I'm like, what is this? No mention of this company on the resume. No mention of doing his own thing on the side. So I rang him up and I said to him, listen, I've got a problem. This has come up the reference, you know, it's showing that this person isn't your manager. Oh, well, they haven't updated their profile.

The tone in response changed, changed, was not happy that I was challenging it. And so it was quite defensive and said, Oh, well, they haven't changed their LinkedIn profile. And then I said about this business and they said, well, I'm closing that business. Somebody didn't mention it to me. Well, I'm closing it anyway.

I haven't done anything on that business for like six months. I'm like, you just updated Instagram three days ago. I said, I'm going to, I'm going to speak with the employer. I'm just gonna, you know, I'll let them know that you're going to close the business, but it's at the employer's discretion as to where we go with this.

So the candidate was not happy at all. I've never known a recruiter do this. I'm like, the client is paying me to find you. And I'm going to put you in there when you're in direct competition with their business. I don't think so. So anyway, went back to the client said, look, it's your call. This is the situation.

I'm so sorry. This has come up. He's going to close his business. Do you want to get him back in for another interview? What do you want to do? You liked him. I liked him, but this is what's come up. What did he decide to do? He lied. He's not genuine. He's out. I agree. And so, yeah, you know, if you'd have just said at the beginning, I can't get this, or, you know, I've had this business, it's not working out.

Yep. It would have been okay, but it's not okay. So unfortunately he didn't get the job. He was not happy with me at all, but unfortunately I'm paid to find good people for my clients. So reference checking is so important. To finish off Kelly, what, what advice would you give to employers doing their own reference checking?

What, what are your main pieces of advice here? Key thing. Do them. They just don't do them. I hear it time and time again. Oh, well, you know, we didn't do the reference. You have to do the reference check, but it's time. They don't have the time, you know, give it to me. I'll just make the call for you, you know, but yeah, do the reference checks cause it's so important.

And by asking for the reference check, it's going to start an alarm bell ringing if the candidate can't provide you with that information, you're halfway there. So don't think just because there's Joe blogs on the resume as the referee, that that is genuine. And that the client, the candidate has nothing to hide because I can tell you they sometimes do.

Well, look, I think that that brings up another really big point for me that we covered off in a previous episode. And that is that they can, if anyone out there listening, just wants to come to you, to the recruitment people to do your, your reference checking for you. You can do that. Yes, absolutely. Just that.

And so, you know, pass that bit off, get, get the final tick that you need without having to worry about it yourself. And you know, as you've heard in today's episode, just everything that you do do and you do it well and you do it thoroughly and you know, when you get that, you tick, you know, it's a tick.

Absolutely. Thanks for sharing your insights today. I mean, anyone listening now would be better equipped to conduct a reference checks that, you know, a thorough. And, uh, you know, get the, get the information that you absolutely need. So, um, look, reach out to Kelly and her team for full recruitment services or just reference checking.

They are the experts. It's one of the things that just keep coming up time and time again in these episodes, the value that you, you do add to, to the recruitment process. So look, Don't, don't miss any of our future episodes. Hit that subscribe button. Give us a comment, give us a, uh, a like, share us around.

We love to, to get this out to as many people as we possibly can. So, and of course, why not give us a five star review? Kelly, thanks for joining us once again.