Top 5 questions to ask when checking references

Eli Lopian    Management for Geeks    

It has taken me some time to really follow the best practice of checking references,  both before hiring of new employees and of external contractors. Now I don’t move without it. The main reason that I didn’t check references is that it seemed to be a useless process, every reference I talked to always said great things about the employee/contractor and I never seemed to get anything useful.

Now, I get invaluable information from the references, at times it

This was because I didn’t ask the REAL questions, now I have found what questions to ask and the key is to LISTEN, but really listen, to the answers given.

The questions are:

1. How long have you worked together?

2. What didn’t go well? What were you NOT pleased about?

3. Would you hire him/her again today?

4. Did you ever think of leaving/firing him?

5. Try to help me out here, if we are going to work together, what would be the problematic areas? What is going to be tough? Where can I fail?

Tip: If you don’t get an answer, say, No one is perfect, unless someone is paying you, there must have been some things that went wrong.

(Make sure to keep a written record of all conversations to put in a candidate’s file.)