Sample frameDay 295·Hiring · Select

Two phone calls stand between you and everything you're otherwise going to find out the hard way.

Hiring.

The Reference Search

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The question

Think about the last reference call you made, or the last one you quietly skipped: did you go in with a specific scorecard line you were trying to settle, or with a vague hope that somebody might volunteer a warning? One of those is a search. The other is a formality with a phone attached.

The idea

The evidence on references as a score is not flattering. The same 1984 meta-analysis that put work samples near the top of the table — John and Ronda Hunter's, in Psychological Bulletin — puts reference checks near the bottom for entry-level jobs: ahead of the unstructured interview, well behind ability tests and job tryouts, and nowhere near strong enough to decide anything on. That is the correct verdict on a reference used as a rating, and the wrong one on a reference used as a search. Bradford Smart, whose mis-hire arithmetic opened this elective, treats the call as an investigation rather than a courtesy, and moves two things: who arranges it, and what gets asked. The candidate arranges it, with their actual former managers — Smart calls this the threat of reference check, and half its value arrives before anyone picks up a phone, in what people quietly decline to claim once they know you'll be speaking to the person who watched them work. That is the realistic preview pointed backwards: the earlier a candidate knows the truth will surface, the less of it they try to hide. What to ask once you're through belongs to a different book by a different Smart: Geoff Smart and Randy Street's Who, from 2008, which scripts the reference call around a rating out of ten for how the person performed in that job, then asks straight away what it was about their performance that produced that number. Where this goes wrong is running the call to confirm a decision already made — every question closed, the tone grateful, and the referee reading correctly that nothing here is genuinely open.

The framework

01
Who did they leave off the list?
Every candidate can find three people who will say something warm. Take them, and then ask for the ones the role actually requires: the manager you'd have reported to in each of the last two jobs — not a peer, not a client, not a mentor from six years ago. Ask the candidate to make the introduction, because that request does its own quiet work. And ask every referee, at the end, who else saw this work closely. A name that arrives from a referee rather than from the candidate is the most valuable call you'll make, and you only ever get it by asking.
02
Which line of the scorecard is this call for?
Go into every call with one or two specific things you're trying to settle: the outcome the interviews left unresolved, the competency the work sample couldn't reach, the gap in the record nobody explained convincingly. Say it plainly to the referee — I'm trying to work out whether she's taken a team through a genuine cutback, and I want an occasion rather than a character reference. Referees hand you generalities largely because generalities are what they get asked for. A named, dated, specific situation is easy to answer honestly and almost impossible to fabricate warmly.
03
Ask for the number, then ask why it isn't a ten.
Who hands you the rating and the reason: out of ten, how did this person perform in that job, and what was it about their performance that produced that number. Add two moves of your own. Anchor the rating — against everyone else you've managed at this level — so the referee is placing somebody rather than grading them, and nobody has to volunteer a criticism from a standing start. Then ask what would have taken them to the next number up, which converts a rating into information, because the honest answer is always a real limitation, described gently. Then sit through the pause. The most useful sentence of the whole call usually arrives about six seconds after you'd normally have started talking again.
04
The written record, before the offer goes out.
Type up what each referee actually said within the hour, against the same scorecard lines everybody else was scored on, and circulate it before anyone drafts terms. References run after a decision are theatre, and every person on the call knows it. Run before, they change things: the scope narrows, the first ninety days get rewritten, the support you now know they'll need is built in on day one instead of discovered in month five. None of what you learn here is wasted even when you do hire — most of it becomes the induction.

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