Although much talked about, do references actually hold any weight when it comes to landing that dream job? Furthermore, are Australian employers doing their homework by ensuring that employee references are works of fact, not fiction.
In the halcyon days of the 1980s when the demand for IT skills once again far outstripped supply, many organisations were so keen to fill positions that anyone with a touch of IT experience and the ability to bluff their way through an interview could land a job.
Mercifully, the recession of the early 1990s did much to clean up the profession and weed out the cowboys. However, is the current acute IT skills shortage once again compromising good recruitment practices? In particular, are employers taking the word of job applicants solely on face value instead of asking for and checking references?
James Howison, national recruitment manager, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, thinks this may be the case in some organisations, especially smaller ones, given the boom that the industry has gone through. However, he considers reference checking to be a vital component of the overall recruitment process, chiefly because it is the final stage, where you obtain third party information about an individual.
-It's also very important to make sure you are speaking with the right people, and that's the trick to referencing. It comes down to the experience of the person doing the reference check. I think they should be done by a recruitment or HR professional rather by an admin person or the applicant's would be manager, because it's a recruiting skill, not an administrative part of the process," Howison adds.
However, it should also be remembered that reference checking is just one component of many in the recruitment process and should not be relied on solely. When Ken, an IT project manager, raised professional and ethical concerns with Laura, his (non-IT) boss, about her direction and strategy, she made a thinly veiled threat about his need for a reference from her at some time in the future. When pressed by the HR director at his subsequent exit interview a few months later, Ken was honest and candid about his professional opinion of Laura, although he realised she would probably get to see the interview report.
Howison considers it important to get references from different sources and agrees that personality differences happen. If so, he thinks the candidate needs to be honest about the situation. In that case, or if he were to hear a guarded or less than flattering account, Howison says he would follow up with an additional check, possibly from a different individual in the same organisation, but always someone in a senior role.
-By the time you get to the reference checking stage, the applicant [should have] gone through several interviews and been psyche tested and the like. So to find a reference check that isn't supportive is rare," Howison says.
