Employers digging deep on prospective workers

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Checking references seems more like guerrilla warfare lately. Hiring managers want to find out everything they can about you before they offer you a job, and conventional tactics don’t seem to be enough.

Many managers are reluctant to give recommendations because companies are worried about being sued if they bad-mouth a former employee. And many employees are stacking their reference lists with people who will only say glowing things about them, even omitting employers from their resume who may have negative comments.

To combat this, hiring managers have a cadre of maneuvers. Many are now using social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook to dig up dirt. Others are calling references you never OK'd. Still others are grilling past employers on your reference list in the hopes of getting them to slip. Some firms are also asking job candidates to sign waivers promising not to sue a former boss if he or she says bad things about you.

“They’re going above and beyond, and they’re going underground,” said Julie Bauke, a career expert and owner of Cincinnati-based Congruity Consulting.

During tough economic times, employers want to make sure every hire is the right one, making reference checks more important than ever.

Some employers have only a few open positions, so they want employees who can best help boost the bottom line. The cost of a bad hire is even more painful when there’s less money to go around.

“Three years ago, if you had a live body and no one really hated them, then they were hired,” said Peter Engel, senior recruiter at New York-based Cantor Executive Search Solutions Inc. “Now they’re really looking much more closely.”

Alan, an unemployed marketing professional, had one of his listed references call to say a hiring manager grilled him for more than a half hour about his job performance.

Digging deeper
Alan, who is looking for a position in New York and did not want his name used for fear of jeopardizing his job search, said: “The HR person was almost trying to trick my reference into saying something negative. They were asking, ‘What are Alan’s weaknesses? What can he improve on?’ and on and on, beyond what was expected. It was like the third degree.”

Hiring managers are looking to get beyond the name, rank and serial number approach used by so many employers that have told by their HR department not to provide too much information, said Maryann Donovan, president of recruiting firm Impact Personnel in Norwalk, Conn.

It’s also getting harder to just leave an employer off your resume if you’re afraid they’ll give you a bad reference, Donovan added, because some employers are now asking for proof that you did what you said you did during those gaps on your resume.

To check off-list references or figure out what a candidate's career path was really like, recruiters are turning to social media sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Functions such as the recommendation option on LinkedIn can immediately show a hiring manager if former bosses or underlings liked working for them.

But too many recommendations on any of these sites can seem disingenuous, Donovan warned. “I had one client call me recently to tell me they were about to make an offer to someone but were worried because the person had 50 recommendations on LinkedIn. The client wondered why they needed so many,” she said.

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