Reference Checking

I hate but also love checking references. I hate them because in all the years that I have been recruiting, no one has ever asked me to contact a bad reference. I love them also because I will normally check anywhere from 3 to 5 references on every candidate and I almost always find that 1 or 2 of them are also interested in hearing about new opportunities. And when dealing in a niche area like Oracle Apps, every new potential candidate I can find is a huge plus. Also, when I was doing business development efforts in my earlier contract staffing services days, I also found that some of the managers who acted as a reference for a candidate also made good sales leads into a new client.

But, this normally takes time that I find I don't always have, so it is still a pain to have to call someone to ask them what they know about the candidate I am looking to employ when I know they are not going to tell me anything bad about the person. Of course, there have been times with a little leading, where I have confirmed a perceived misrepresentation on a candidate's actual experience but I try not to do ask too many leading questions to purposely try to disqualify the candidate. I only do this when I have a strong suspicion that the candidate is not all that they seem. Just last week I had to do this. Candidate told me he was a Functional Implementation Lead and instead, it turned out that the only role played on the implementation by this candidate was training the users on how to work with the application. That is a far cry from actually doing the module set-up and configuration.