The 20 Most Common Things That Come Up During Reference Checks [Archive.org URL]

We don’t know much about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to reference checks. That’s because there’s very little research that’s been conducted on the practice. So how can we gain insight into what reference checks actually do? The company I work for, SkillSurvey, is in the business of facilitating checks online. To date, we have reference feedback on approximately 3.2 million job candidates, across most job titles and industries. The feedback involves ratings on work competencies, as well as open-ended comments. Over a year ago, we launched a study to describe the content and nature of the comments provided by the references, yielding data from a sample of 12,800 references — the largest analysis of feedback that we’re aware of. Specifically, we focused on open-ended text comments that ask about an applicant’s work-related strengths and areas for improvement — and even though it is optional for references to provide these comments, we found that the majority of references did indeed provide this information on the applicant’s strengths and areas for improvement (89% and 83%, respectively).

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