Make time to authenticate the jobseeker’s referees

When smart HR practitioners are reviewing resumes of jobseekers, they refrain from going to the reference section of the documents containing referee information when the candidate is not ideal from the point of view of minimum education, degree and relevance of experience and other criteria set in the publication. 

But when the jobseeker falls within the ideal range as set by the employer, the reviewer usually continues to the end of the document. Mental snapshots of the references are taking and some HRs make it their business to start even the entire process from the referees all the way up.

Referees should and do matter to employers and HRs alike. The human resource manager who does not want to hear unpleasant gossips about labour turnover must pry the character of the person she/he is hiring. 

As much as plentiful resources available on the multiple online social platforms, as well as professional media, can offer a cue as regards the moral character and sometimes the attitudes of the jobseeker, referees remain the most important source of information for this purpose. 

Jobseekers who have had earlier interactions with a career coach may have been tutored to always include in the list of referees one person whose background and point of view will pass easily on attitudes and character scales. Men and women of religion, imams of reasonably high standing, social club patrons and leadership, et cetera fit into this context and are often very reliable sources of information when evaluating a candidate’s attitudes and moral character.

The fiduciary industry in general, stock buying and selling, the jewelry business, the security services and intelligence work are a few of the areas where not only the attitudes of the jobseeker is crucially important but also the moral character of the candidate comes to play. 

In the above industries, honesty, integrity and rectitude are great prizes a serious employer would not overlook. Businesses that fall into the above category go the extra mile to procure information about the jobseeker beyond the certifications their documents carry.

When you are hunting to fill a position that requires the ideal candidate to possess enormous amount of experience and multiple skills-set, certificates that exhibit the amount of time taken to obtain the various qualifications may be submitted to you for consideration. 

What you do not receive, however, is the precise information about the real work output and production related skills of the prospect. That information is held up by persons in the reference who were supervisors of the jobseeker, the manager under whom the candidate worked and persons to whom this prospect reported periodically. 

When a resume is professionally done, it has to have one referee who passes as the mouthpiece for the candidate’s on-the-job skills. Usually, candidates find a way to secure the consent of one of these managers to use them as a referee. Persons in these capacities are a perfect repertoire for handy pieces of information that aid your human resource planning decisions. 

For tasks that require the incumbent to combine multiple skills such as complicated analysis, the frequent use of logic, and great intellectual prowess, apart from the usual psychometric tests, the referees candidates put on their resumes can help the HR get to gauge these aptitudes better.

Most of the degree and diploma holders from colleges who lack real industry experience usually fall on the lecturers they have spent most time with. The traditional thing this crop of jobseekers have done is to use the professor who assisted them during their short thesis. 

Because of the complexity of that academic project and the relatively long span of time required to complete it, students tend to build closer relationships with their supervisors. 

By the time an average thesis is over, the supervising lecturer is in the position to identify each student and be able to authoritatively give a fairly accurate idea about the intellectual capacity and promise of the student. 

Tasks that require the prospect to come to the new position with an agile, analytically ripe and intellectually challenging mind usually put a lot more weight on the recommendations of this kind of referee. 

In a technology age as advanced as ours, HRs should insist that candidates add reliable emails of the persons they are using as referees together with phone numbers so that the burden of background checking exercise can be lightened. Besides, electronic mail addresses make it easy to send assessment forms via emails and request completed forms to be returned automatically to the sender’s address. 

In addition to the above merits, the electronic mailing system has a better chance of forestalling the situation where candidates connive with referees to write glowing tributes about them or the candidate being privy to and even vetting the information being forwarded to the employer by their referees. 

Such unethical underhand dealings have a chance of being discovered as emails trails may accompany the real mail where utmost care was not taken during the disclosure of the information to the candidate.

Emailing also has the unique strength of making it possible for the HR or the employer to authenticate the referee and be sure they are the true persons they claim to be. Jobseekers with suspicious backgrounds have been known to submit addresses of relatives, parents and even fake men of God as their referees. Using emails may give a cue whether a jobseeker is using the right address or faking someone. 

A referee currently working with a company usually will have his/her email linked to the mother web address of the company they are currently working for. A referee-manager at Afimfi-Wey Petroleum, for instance, is ninety-five per cent more likely to have kwame@afimfiweypetroleum.com/gh/uk as their email address depending on the geographical area of the location of their operations. 

Where the referee opts to use their private email, there will still be that chance that their names may feature in the address. Even where the exact names do not perfectly feature in the address, a smart HR with average literacy in online research can use the various professional, as well as social platforms to arrive at the real man or woman being passed as a manager in Afimfi-Wey Petroleum. 

Companies operating in industries where the need to authenticate the candidate is not as urgent a requirement as it may be for other businesses need not go through too much hell trying to check the background and authenticity of referees. 

But for positions of enormous authority and responsibility, only a reckless HR or an employer ready to throw away their money will hand over a job to a prospect without this due diligence. 

For, in the end, when you hire a candidate whose referees are artificial, it is the company that loses even if you publish a disclaimer in the prime newspaper about that candidate after they have duped your business or misrepresented you in several deals.