Check Employment Reference: Questions to Ask References

Consider How Critical Good Hiring Decisions Are Now

Many hiring managers still don’t care much about the checking employment reference process. Even in the event where they are looking to fill an entry-level position they think it’s a waste of time.

While it’s understandable to feel that way, this process has become crucial as mentioned above it can save you a lot of time. By choosing to make A+ selections right from the start, a hiring manager can easily fill in the gap with a qualified person. That action can save companies literally weeks worth of time down the road.

Talk To Operations Managers

While most other managers and administrators will stick to the usual statements, direct supervisors may speak more openly. If you are lucky and manage to get a conversation going with them make sure you pay attention to pauses, hesitations, and more noticeably, hostility or bitterness.

Avoid Personal References

In the event that you are hiring someone who has never been employed before, you want to make it clear you won’t accept personal references. The reason being is that personal references will often have biased opinions which is the last thing you want as a hiring manager. But even in the situation that someone was never employed before, you still want to avoid friends and family. A good place to be starting is seeing if they were involved in volunteer worker or any after school activities.

Ask Essay Questions, Not Multiple Choice

If you are able to make a connection a good way to check employment reference quality is to ask open-ended questions. You want to be getting in-depth answers and the only way to do that is through this line of questioning. If you don’t, you’ll get short responses, which can be hard to figure out the true answer.

Automated Referencing Software

Thinking of good questions to ask references can be a challenging and time consuming task. It becomes even more difficult when hiring for many different roles within multiple sectors. Once you've come up with a good set of questions to ask you have to store them somewhere and make sure another team member has access to them, doesn't delete them, and can be changed with ease. Automated referencing software is here to help. Create customisable question profiles that separate questions across job roles, reference types, and industries. With RefNow, it takes less than 30 seconds to select your question profile and send off a reference request to your candidate. Automated employment referencing has made so many peoples' lives easier, read about our customer success stories here.

Questions To Ask

With those considerations in mind, here is a batch of questions that are great for checking employment reference quality. Assembled by the National Restaurant Association, these questions are geared to be direct questions before expanding to more open-ended.

1. Can you verify the candidate’s dates of employment, title, and role for me?
2. Would you ever rehire this candidate given the chance? Why or why not? What were their reasons for leaving?
3. How often did they receive an promotion while working for you? Have they ever gotten demotions? Or did they remain in the same role throughout?
4. What was their beginning and ending salary? How often did they get a raise?
5. What kind of duties and responsibilities were they assigned? Did they do a good job? Or did they exceed above and beyond what was necessary?
6. What sort of strengths did they have while working for you? Would you describe them as a hard worker?
7. Were they punctual? What sort of issues did they have around tardiness or absenteeism, if any?
8. How well did they get along with their peers? With managers? With customers?
9. Is there anything else I should take into consideration before I hire this candidate?