Call me maybe
Over the last 12 months, I've gotten 48 different job reference calls about 41 different people who once worked at Textio. I don't know if people are especially actively looking for jobs this year or what, but this is almost twice as many as I've received in any prior year.
I love doing job calls for Extios. If someone spent a long time doing great work building my company, they have me in their corner forever. This year, I've found it striking that, among all the people I've gotten calls about, 22% of them are pursuing substantially different kinds of jobs than they held when we worked together at Textio.
Reference calls by the numbers
I've written about career change before. For instance, we saw that 76% of AI 50 CEOs have a history of meaningful career change, and that the more often people change careers, the more opinionated they are on LinkedIn. I am a career changer myself, and at Textio, I successfully hired many people with a history of career change into important roles at the company.
Even still, these numbers surprised me. 22% is a lot of career change. Some people have changed disciplines or industries. A couple are starting their own companies, so the calls I got are from investors rather than traditional hiring managers.
The career change stats are interesting on their own, but they're even more striking in the context of these calls. Among the 48 reference calls I received, only 28 were requested by the candidate themselves. 20 calls, or 42%, were backchannel references.
Backchannel calls, where a potential employer reaches out to a candidate's former coworkers for feedback without the candidate's knowledge, are controversial. Candidates hate them because they fear (rightly) that they won't be able to provide critical context. Employers like them because they suspect (rightly) that the references a candidate explicitly provides will be more positive than balanced, and they want honest feedback.
Maybe another time I will say more about backchannel references. For now, I'll just say that if you do backchannels, you should 1. disclose to candidates upfront that this is part of your process, 2. make the calls at the very end of your process rather than the beginning, and 3. never, ever call anyone from the candidate's current employer. In any case, for 42% of my calls to be backchannels is astounding.
I've also gotten a surprising number of calls about people I didn't work with all that long. Among the 41 people I received calls about, I worked with 41% of them for less than three years, and I worked with 15% of them for less than 18 months.
In addition, of all the people I got calls about, I last worked with 39% of them more than five years ago.
I found this noteworthy. If someone has only worked with me for six months and that was eight years ago, and if they're interviewing for a totally different kind of job, it doesn't make much sense for me to provide feedback. But that doesn't stop people from asking, including via backchannel.
Across all 48 calls, I declined to give feedback in 11 of them. If I give a reference, I am totally honest and I mean it wholeheartedly. In most cases where I declined to provide feedback, I just didn't have enough context to weigh in on the person's ability to do the job.
Should you ever give a negative reference?
You do you, but I have given explicitly negative references only twice. In both cases, I was contacted backchannel, and in both cases, the candidates in question had behaved unethically on the job. When asked, I felt a moral obligation to inform potential employers.
If a former coworker asks me to be their reference, I only agree if I believe that the balance of my feedback is positive and works in their favor. Otherwise, I recommend that the candidate find someone different to ask. I never lie on a reference call, but I'm also not interested in sabotaging someone's chances of getting hired.
What about you? Are you seeing more job reference calls this year? How many are backchannels?
Kieran
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