Reference Check Tips to Avoid Bad Hires

July 15, 2015 at 11:17 AM by Rob Stevenson

You invested hours of your time sourcing, screening, interviewing, and extending an offer. The team is in love. Your candidate's got all the makings of an A player, and you're thrilled to watch them hit the ground running. 

But then.

The dreaded disengaged employee. A bad hire. 

Besides the frustration you'll undoubtedly feel, bad hires are expensive and demoralizing. There's tons of onboarding and retention strategies you can enact to try and make sure great candidates turn into great employees, but one of the best ways to avoid bad hires is to not hire them in the first place. So how do you sniff them out? Well, step 1 is finishing this blog post.

Reference Check it Out

By the time you've interviewed your candidate, they've surely provided you with some references who can testify to their professional abilities. While this is a good starting point, you've got to really dig in to these to find something truly illuminating. These references have been deliberately selected because they're likely to give a glowing (wrong kind of illumination) review. One question we like to ask listed references is "On a scale of 1-10, how much would you want to work with this person again?" If they say anything but "10", push. Ask "why not a 10?". Here, you've pointed out in the reference's mind the gap between who the candidate really is and who they would be as a perfect co-worker. At this point, you'll be able to get away from the overwhelming positivity, and find something with which to follow up on in future interviews with your candidate.

Next, conduct back channel references. This means finding people your candidate has worked with before, ideally someone with whom someone on your team is connected, to talk about what that person is like in the office. If you can get a hold of a former manager, ask them "what's the best way to set this person up for success?". If the answer to that question sounds like something you can't recreate in your own organization, it's probably not a good fit.

How do you go about sniffing out disengaged employees? Hit us up in the comments!

 

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