Recruiters should step back and take a good hard look at their referencing processes, says recruitment expert John Sullivan, because in most cases they are useless, misleading and a waste of time.
In a recent article in US website ERE.net, Sullivan argued that the evolution of defamation and discrimination law in most developed economies now prevented former employers from providing negative, or even detailed references.
"Many firms have a policy restricting reference conversations to factual information such as job title, dates of employment, and possibly salary history," he said.
While this may provide some insight on an applicant's background, Sullivan pointed out that in the majority of cases, the contact details for the person at the previous employer were provided by the applicant, so there was no real guarantee the information is accurate.
Furthermore, because of growing mobility in the workforce, references and referees quickly became out of date.
Personal references were even more likely to be 100% positive because the applicant only provided contacts who would provide glowing responses. And sometimes previous managers were just happy to be rid of problem employees, so provided positive references.
Despite the numerous and obvious shortfalls in reference-checking practices, recruiters continued to blindly follow their processes "because it has always been done", said Sullivan.
He said most studies on the validity of reference recommendations show a "staggeringly low" correlation between the references and the employee's actual performance.
Employers and recruiters didn't seem particularly interested in analysing the effectiveness of their methods, he added. "Unfortunately, I have never come across an organisation that routinely gathers and analyses data on the predictive accuracy of their reference process."
Sullivan said recruiters now "have years of data and access to sophisticated tools to better determine what does and doesn’t work as an indicator" of an applicant's likely performance.
He argued that recruiters should review their referencing protocols, consider the weaknesses, and re-evaluate whether their efforts were worthwhile.
