The case for evidence-based hiring

A campaigning politician recently promised that, if elected, he will employ an “evidence-based decision-making model” to resolve society’s problems. This would contrast with his opponents’ practice of “decision-based evidence-making”—seeking evidence to support decisions that have already been made.

Sounds good. Wouldn’t we all welcome a world where decisions were based on the best available evidence?

Yet, while no one would admit to doing the opposite—using an evidence-making approach—the world is full of examples of decisions that were made without first carefully examining the relevant information.

Often, decisions are made first, then followed by a scramble to find reasons that justify the choices of politicians and business leaders. “Evidence-makers” rely on conspiracy theories, “alternative facts” (thanks to former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway for inventing the term), and the deliberate misinterpretation of credible research findings.

It happens in politics, where solutions that are popular (i.e., what gets you elected) may be at odds with approaches that work elsewhere or are supported by mounds of research. It happens in business, where policies are created to address problems that don’t exist.

Alas, it also happens when hiring, when decisions are driven by factors that may be unconscious, such as gut feelings, biases and first impressions.

Detective Hercule Poirot provides an interesting take on the power of the subconscious near the end of the 2023 film, A Haunting in Venice: “My subconscious mind assembled facts ahead of the rational.” 

A rational approach is essential whether identifying a murderer or identifying the right person to hire. When you have a vacancy to fill, you must use interviews and reference checks to gather pertinent evidence before making your hiring decision.

Before beginning to gather evidence, identify the competencies and attitudes the ideal next addition to your staff should possess. Develop questions that will reveal evidence that candidates have what you are seeking. Create a rubric that enables you to objectively assess responses to each question. What would you expect of a potential top performer? What would be acceptable? And what would be an unsatisfactory response?

During interviews, avoid asking opinion questions. Don’t ask candidates, “What would you do if …?” Ask how they have responded to circumstances similar to those they might encounter if hired. 

Don’t ask if they feel collaboration and customer service are important. Instead, ask them to describe a time when they collaborated with co-workers or how they resolved a customer’s problem.

Don’t ask references if they would hire this candidate again or for their assessment of the individual’s performance. Ask them to describe how the candidate has collaborated with colleagues or how they responded to a customer’s issue.

Keep your questions short to avoid providing hints about what you would prefer to hear from the candidate. 

Decision-first hiring often results when interviewers make a quick judgment about candidates. Once judgments are made, interviewers stop listening for evidence that is contrary to their first impressions. 

Keep an open mind. Resist the urge to make early assessments based on what happens early in interviews. Candidates who perform poorly early on may redeem themselves as the interview progresses, while early “front-runners” will fade in the stretch. Collect as much evidence as you can before making hiring decisions.

When you practise evidence-based decision-making, you are setting yourself up for hiring success. You will be prepared to select the right people to fill your vacancies.

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Want to make evidence-based hiring the norm in your organization? Contact Nelson (nmscott@telus.net or phone/text 780-232-3828) to schedule an Interview Right to Hire Right workshop for your leadership team or to learn more about this and other workshops and programs.

Get Your “Jury” Right When Hiring

I have written previously that the purpose of juries in criminal trials and interview panels are similar. Both are charged with the responsibility to make decisions based on their examination of the facts presented to them.

What juries decide must be unanimous. What interview panels decide should be. Whatever they decide has a profound effect on individuals’ futures.

Selecting who will sit on a jury is an important first step in criminal trials, as is deciding who to invite to join an interview panel in the hiring process. Just as a great amount of investigation occurs before a trial begins its jury selection, interview panels should be assembled early in the recruitment process to assist in identifying the criteria by which applicants will be assessed and in writing questions to be asked during interviews and reference checks.

Both juries and panels require people who are able to keep an open mind, resist making preliminary judgments, set aside biases and focus on the evidence as presented, whether it comes from witnesses during trials or from candidates and their references when hiring.

The challenge of empanelling a jury likely has never been so stark as it will be when jury selection begins on March 25 in the New York trial of Donald Trump.

The former and would-be future American president faces a 34-count indictment related to alleged hush money payment to former adult film star Stormy Daniels just weeks before the 2016 election.

Recently published articles on the websites of BBC News and ABC News illustrate how difficult it will be to find 12 jurors, plus six alternatives, for this trial. While the process could wrap up within a day, it could also extend for several days.

Jury selection could take a great deal of time, former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told the BBC, because “everyone knows who Donald Trump is. Everyone has an opinion about him.”

“Trying to find a pool of people who don’t know, don’t have a view about Trump or don’t know about the case is going to take time,” former federal prosecutor Josh Naftalis told ABC News.

The BBC article predicts that, “Prospective jurors could face a range of questions when the trial kicks off, from where they get their news to whether they have ever put a political bumper sticker on their car.

“They may also be asked if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, if they have read any of Mr. Trump’s books or if they have listened to anything from [Trump’s former personal attorney Michael] Cohen,” a frequent guest on television news networks.

While the consequences are not as severe as in criminal cases—no one is going to jail—the decisions of interview panels will impact the lives of the people they interview. Take care when selecting who will sit on interview panels.

Do they know some of the candidates, but not others? Do they have opinions about those they know? Are they able to suspend judgment until they have heard what each candidate has said? Are there any biases that might influence their opinions about candidates?

In the ABC article, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who previously served as the chief of the Manhattan district attorney’s trial division, sounds an optimistic note about jurors’ ability to set bias and opinions aside in Trump’s trial and focus on the facts. 

“There’s something very solemn about a courtroom and sitting in judgment of somebody.” 

Interview panels should treat their role just as seriously.

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Considering who to invite to join interview panels and their role on the panel is a topic covered during the daylong workshop Interview Right to Hire Right. Contact Nelson (nmscott@telus.net or phone/text 780-232-3828) to schedule Interview Right to Hire Right training for your leadership team or to learn more.

Are you inadvertently “leading the witness” when interviewing?

Fans of courtroom dramas such as Law and Order will be familiar with a line that appears in many scripts: “Objection your honour; counsel is leading the witness.”

The Oxford Dictionary of Canadian English offers two definitions of a leading question:

1. a question that prompts the answer wanted.

2. A craftily worded question intended to lead the questioned person to say something incriminating.

Leading questions can change the witness’s memory of the event.

“Did they tell you not to tell anyone?” prompts the witness to answer “Yes.”  Asking “What did they tell you?” doesn’t limit the scope of what the witness remembers about the conversation. 

On the other hand, rather than asking, “What did you see when you entered the house?” a lawyer might lead the witness to a single-word answer by asking, “Was the glass broken when you entered the house?”

“Leading the witness” is not limited to courtrooms. Questions can be manipulated in surveys when the purpose is to confirm a point of view and not to learn what people think. 

During hiring interviews, interviewers phrase questions in ways that will sway the candidate to answer in a particular way. After requesting  the candidate to recall a specific experience, they unintentionally hint at the appropriate way to responding by adding, “What did you do?”

For example: “Describe a time when you had a conflict with a co-worker. How did you resolve this situation? What did you do to restore your relationship with this individual?”

Ideally, the interviewer would want to learn exactly what the candidate did to resolve the situation and restore the relationship with the co-worker but leaving those extra questions unasked provides candidates with the latitude to answer the main question as they wish. 

If an interviewer stops after requesting that the candidate, “Describe a time when you had a conflict with a co-worker,” they might learn about how the candidate feels about conflict and who is responsible for resolving them. You could learn that the candidate’s solution was to avoid interacting with this co-worker in the future. Perhaps they left it to the other person to take the first steps toward restoring the relationship or expected their supervisor to step in to resolve the conflict.

 It’s unlikely that’s what you would hope to hear from a potential staff member, but you would have learned none of this if you had asked how the candidate had resolved the conflict and restored the relationship.

The best way to avoid asking leading questions is to ask short questions. If necessary, you can follow up the candidate’s initial response with additional questions to learn more about the candidate’s past performance.

Whether in the courtroom, conducting surveys or participating in hiring interviews, the goal should be to learn as much as possible. Asking questions that hint at the appropriate response will limit what you learn. And when hiring, what you don’t learn can prevent you from making the right hiring decision.

No Quick Route to Hiring Right

Fleur Perkins: Which do you want? You can have it quick or you can have it right.”

John Barnaby: How about both?

— Midsomer Murders, Season 21, Episode 1: “The Point of Balance”  

What Deputy Chief Inspector Barnaby wants—a quick path to identifying the murderer—is similar to what many managers, school principals and others in leadership positions wish for when hiring: to fill the vacancy with the right person as quickly as possible.

Barnaby wants immediate answers to his questions so he can quickly fill a vacant jail cell. What killed her? Is there DNA under her fingernails? When did she die?

The pathologist deflects each question by saying that she will know more after she  “gets back to the lab,” where she can examine the body before providing definitive responses to Barnaby’s inquiries.

When Barnaby’s impatience with the pathologist’s cautious approach becomes obvious, the pathologist responds with a question of her own: does the police officer want quick answers or does he want them to be correct?

Receiving answers that are both quick and right when investigating a crime or when hiring would be ideal, but if you can have only one, making the right decision always trumps one that is quick.

As legendary western lawman (and some historians would suggest, occasional outlaw) Wyatt Earp said, “Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.” True during gun fights. True when hiring.

Success in detective work or in hiring comes from slow but steady progress after examining all the available evidence to make the  arrest or hire the right person. It’s not done by acting quickly.

The temptation to fill a vacancy quickly is hard to resist, particularly in the face of pressure from other staff, from clients or customers. Vacancies mean that some tasks will go undone and existing staff may be required to assume a greater workload.

Getting it wrong comes with consequences. Failing to hire the right person is the equivalent of arresting the wrong suspect. Wishing to avoid the short-term pain caused by a vacancy can lead to the long-term pain of living with a hiring mistake.

Like detectives, you want to get it right the first time.

Taking time to review the evidence gathered from resumes and during interviews and from reference checks before making a job offer is as important as taking time to examine all the clues before identifying the killer.

As we learned from Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare, success can come from proceeding with caution rather than acting quickly and carelessly. Slow and steady wins the race.

Fleur Perkins gets it. Whether investigating crime or hiring staff, you must want to “have it right.”

Ask for one more example to learn more before hiring

Candidates’ initial responses to interview questions frequently don’t contain enough information. To obtain a better picture of what they have done in the past, it may be necessary to ask one more question. Or several more.

Whether conducting an interview or checking references, your purpose is to find evidence about how the candidate has performed in circumstances similar to what they may encounter in your workplace. You are seeking examples of a candidate’s previous on-the-job performance.

As advocates of behaviour description interviewing (BDI) say, “Past performance is the best predictor of future performance.”

Candidates, who frequently are better prepared for interviews than those asking the questions, anticipate that they will be asked BDI questions about what they have done in the past. They will arrive with well-rehearsed examples that show how innovative they are, their ability to collaborate with others, their organizational skills and their systematic approach to decision making.

In some cases, those well-thought-out examples may not be typical of the candidate’s past performance. You will need to probe to learn more.

The “past performance” principle comes with caveats. The behaviour that the candidate is describing must be relevant, recent and repeated. If the examples the candidate supplies don’t contain information that you need to make your hiring decision, ask for one more example.

If you judge the example is not relevant to your workplace, ask for another that relates to the tasks the candidate will be asked to perform if hired.

If necessary, ask for a more recent example. What a candidate did five or 10 years ago may not fit today’s workplace. Examples from “long ago” are a reason to wonder if the candidate has developed beyond where they were five or 10 years ago.

And if you feel that what the candidate described was a “one off,” ask for another example to determine if this behaviour has been repeated.

All this applies when checking references. If you are not satisfied with the example the reference provides, ask for one more example.

Just like the candidates, references could have messages that they plan to deliver when approached. 

The candidate may have coached their references about what to say, and they may not be familiar enough with the candidate’s performance to be able to come up with another example.

Asking for one more example when interviewing or checking references may produce what you need to decide if this is the right person to hire.

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Participants in Interview Right to Hire Right workshops develop questions to uncover examples of past behaviour that enable them to hire the right people. Please contact Nelson (nmscott@telus.net or 780-232-3828) to schedule an Interview Right to Hire Right workshop for your leadership team or to learn more about this training.

Banish yes and no questions from interviews and reference checks

Could you carry on a conversation for three minutes without using Yes or No?

Responding to this challenge was the essence of the Yes/No Game played by cruise passengers on the Diamond Princess, this past fall.

The game was also a reminder to anyone who is hiring to avoid asking questions during interviews or reference checks that could be answered with a single word.

The cruise director who hosted the game in one of the ship’s lounges invited participants to engage in a three-minute conversation with her, without uttering either word.

The prize: a bottle of wine. And for competitors who failed: an origami crane. Most left the lounge with a paper crane in hand.

Participants tried to avoid the two prohibited words but most fell short. A typical conversation went something like this:

Host: Where are you from?

Participant: Toronto.

Host: Is that a nice place to live?

Participant: Yes. 

Game over! In less than five seconds.

Interviews can go wrong when interviewers ask questions that can be answered with just one word:

“Do you feel teamwork is important?”

“Was ABC Corporation a good place to work?”

“If we were to hire you, how long would you stay?”

And during reference checks: 

“Would you describe Andy as well-organized?”

“Did Anita work well with her colleagues?”

“Would you hire Joe again?”

There are two reasons the above questions don’t work.

First, where do you go next if the candidate replies, “Yes”? 

Even respected media interviewers can fall into the Yes/No question trap, as occurred when MSNBC host Rachel Maddow was interviewing U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. 

Warren simply answered, “Yes” when asked if she would accept an invitation to be Joe Biden’s 2020 running mate, followed by silence when the senator didn’t add to her response.

Finally, Maddow was able to escape this awkward moment in a way not available during hiring interviews. She went to a commercial.

The second problem is that all these questions ask for the candidate or reference’s opinion, when you should be using interviews and reference checks to gather evidence. Specifically, you’re looking for evidence about the candidate’s past performance that will enable you to form an opinion about whether the candidate is the right person to hire, or not.

Some of those questions can be fixed, but others are not worth asking in any form.

Asked if teamwork is important, most candidates will assume that if you are asking, teamwork must be important to you. Hence, the “correct” answer is “Yes.” Teamwork is important to them.

Better to ask candidates to “describe a time when you were a member of a work team” or to ask references to “provide an example of a time when Anita collaborated with a colleague or colleagues.”

 By asking candidates for their assessment of their previous employers or how long they would commit to stay if hired, you’ll get answers unlikely to yield any information that will be useful to you when deciding which candidate is the right person to hire.

Finally, there is that question about whether the reference would rehire this individual. There is no reason to ask that question.

References are strangers to you, carefully selected and coached by candidates to portray them in the best light. Even if references provide their honest assessment of the individual’s performance, you don’t know the criteria they use to judge employees. Hiring decisions should not be based on the opinion of strangers.

These is a question that requires only a one-word response to keep in mind when making hiring decisions:

Whose is the only opinion that matters when hiring for your organization?

Answer: YOURS!

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How to ask questions during interviews and reference checks is one of the topics covered during Interview Right to Hire Right workshops. Please contact Nelson (nmscott@telus.net or 780-232-3828) to schedule an Interview Right to Hire Right workshop for your leadership team or to learn more about this training.

No more bricklayers! Hire cathedral builders!

One day at the coffee shop where we hang out, my friend Will said something that reminded me of the parable of the Three Bricklayers. In that moment, I realized how well this tale illustrates the difference between the right person for the job and applicants who are unsatisfactory.

In a previous article, I suggested that responses of candidates during interviews be divided into three categories: unsatisfactory, satisfactory or outstanding (the type of response you would expect to hear from your top performers).

The Three Bricklayers parable provides another way of demonstrating the distinction between candidates who have the potential to be top performers and those to avoid hiring.

There are several versions of this story, but what all have in common is a passerby who pauses at a construction site and asks the same questions of three workers. In some versions, the passerby is Christopher Wren, the architect responsible for rebuilding St. Paul’s Cathedral in London after the Great Fire of London in 1666. Other versions feature a man looking for people to build a house or a tourist visiting the city.

What does not change is the question: “What are you doing?”

The first worker responds, “I’m laying bricks to earn enough money to feed my family.”

The second: “I am building a wall, straight and tall.”

Finally, the third worker says, “ I am building a cathedral that will stand more than 100 years to celebrate man’s love for God.”

The distinction among these three men is clear. For the first worker, it’s just another job. For the second, it’s his career. And for the third, it’s a calling. He sees what he does as part of the bigger picture.

The latter response is reminiscent of how a NASA custodian described his role to U.S. president J.F. Kennedy: “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”

He understood the space agency’s mission in the same way your top performers understand how their work contributes to your organization fulfilling its purpose, as reflected in its mission and vision statements and goals.

When you hire people who describe how what they did in previous jobs fit into the bigger picture, you are adding individuals who will be engaged and focused on helping your organization achieve its vision. Those individuals are the ones that will make your organization successful.

To use interviews to discover whether a candidate sees what they do as more than just another job, ask, “Why did what you did in your previous job matter?” or “How did what you did in your previous job contribute to the success of the organization?” 

The right person to hire is the one who talks about the organization’s mission, vision and goals and how what they did contributed to its success.

Every issue of my Briefly Noted newsletter includes, “A question that may help you hire the right people,” with suggestions on how to assess candidates’ responses on a five-point scale, from unsatisfactory (1), to satisfactory (3) and outstanding (5).

As a followup to this article, I intended to include in each of the next two issues of my biweekly newsletter, Briefly Noted, one of the questions from this article and suggest how you might assess candidates’ responses. In addition, I will include tips on how to provide Relevant staff recognition.

Not a Briefly Noted subscriber? Click here to sign up and receive a copy of my Staff Recognition BINGO card.

Once you have hired the right person, staff recognition becomes a strategic tool to clarify the purpose of the organization and ensure that staff members—both new and existing—remain focused on why their job is important. Relevant recognition reflects what the organization believes is important, often expressed in its mission statement, values and goals. 

Skills: Now or Later?

The advice to “hire for attitude and train for skills” presents employers with a challenge. It requires them to abandon a fixation on past career histories in order to evaluate candidates in a more holistic way. 

Your hiring process should go beyond looking at candidates’ education and training and their on-the-job experience. Those are all easy to measure, but they are not a measure of the candidate’s suitability to fill your vacancy.

For some jobs, specific educational requirements are non-negotiable (think teachers, nurses, accountants, engineers, etc.). Certain skills are essential from Day One, but other skills that are necessary for future success in many jobs can be acquired through training.

There may be some value in three or five years of experience, but only if the experience is relevant and if the person did the work in the right way. Five years of doing a job poorly is likely worse than having never done the job at all. It’s easier to learn new skills than to first unlearn bad habits developed over years before training to do the job properly.

It is unwise to think believe an applicant who has done a similar job in the past has the skills for the position you need filled. Instead, you should anticipate hiring people who will need training to meet your performance expectations, even if they have done a similar job before.

Requiring applicants to have a specific number of years of experience does not at all guarantee they have the right skills to do the job you are offering. Including a long list of required skills in advertising in the hope of attracting the right person may instead  discourage very trainable individuals from applying because they lack some of the “required” skills.

It’s enticing to think that you will be able to hire people with all the skills you require. It would certainly reduce your training costs! Employers may also feel they can’t afford to wait for new employees to learn the skills needed. 

But ideal potential employees are rare.

Accepting that no one will be able to step into a new job and be immediately productive frees you to move beyond focusing on only skills when hiring. It allows you to examine potential an employee’s attitude and to consider what they could add to the culture of your workplace. 

In the hiring context, attitude is more than being “friendly” or “enthusiastic.” It is about how people approach work. What is their commitment to customer service and collaboration? Do they apply their creativity and integrity to their work? What motivates them? 

Some will argue that candidates can fake attitude but they can’t fake skills. Anticipating that this may be the case, ask questions that require candidates to describe how their commitment to customers service, collaboration with co-workers, or making carefully considered decisions was reflected in their performance in previous work settings.

To learn more about how a candidate’s past performance has reflected their values and attitudes, confirm what you hear during interviews when checking references.

When you commit to hiring for attitude and some skills, it’s important to identify which skills are fundamental to the job and required on Day One and for which skills you are prepared to give the new employee training.

In a twist on the oft-used interview questions, “What are your career goals?” and “Where do you want to be in five years?” (which in a previous article I advised not asking during interviews), instead set learning targets for newly hired staff that will make them successful in your organization.

As their supervisor, identify what you expect their skill level to be in two years’ time and establish milestones along the way.

If you plan to hire primarily for attitude and are prepared to train new employees, it’s important, during the hiring process, to assess their motivation to learn. Has their past performance reflected their willingness to learn new skills and to do so quickly? 

How to write interview questions to get evidence you need to identify the right person

Along with resumes and application forms and reference checks, interviews are an important component of the process that will assist you to identify the right person to hire—as distinct from the “best” person.

Interviews are an opportunity to learn more about candidates than what you learned from their resumes or application forms. It’s an opportunity to collect evidence about candidates’ previous on-the-job experience. Have they done the right things in the right way for your workplace?

The questions you ask during interviews determine the quality of the information you gather. Before writing your questions, be clear about what you want to learn from the candidates’ answers.

Questions should be tailored to the vacancy to be filled and to the culture of your organization.

If you ask questions because they are the questions that everyone is asking, you can be assured that those are the questions the candidates have prepared themselves to answer. You will learn little about candidates from their well-rehearsed answers. 

There are three considerations when deciding what you will ask about:

Your top performers—What do they do that makes them successful? Write and ask questions that require candidates to describe how they have responded to circumstances similar to what they will experience if hired. Do the candidates provide evidence of having responded as your top performers would respond?

Your organization’s values—What candidates have done previously tells you about their values related to integrity, collaboration, teamwork, customer services, etc. Ask questions to ascertain if the candidates’ past behaviour corresponds to how you would want them to perform. Has what they have done demonstrated that their integrity or commitment to collaboration aligns with that of your organization?

Your organization’s future—What skills, competencies and values are required of staff members who will help carry your organization to its desired future? Use interviews to determine if candidates possess what you will need from them to move your organization forward.

Use the following guidelines when writing interview questions:

Think past tense: Ask about what candidates have done, not what they will do. You want evidence of how they have acted, not speculation about what they might do. Keep in mind the principle of behaviour description interviews (BDI). It states that, “Past performance is the best predictor of future performance.” People tend to respond to situations in the same ways as they responded to similar circumstances in the past. Does what you hear from the candidate align with what you would expect top performers to do and the values of your organization? Begin your requests for information with phrases such as, “Describe a time when …” or “Recall when you were …”

Keep your questions short: Challenge yourself to write questions that could be tweeted, especially back when tweets were limited to just 140 characters. The longer the question, the more likely you are to provide hints about how you want it answered. Candidates will listen to interviewers’ words for hints about what they want to hear. The more talkative interviewers are, the less effective they become.

Be prepared to ask followup questions: Probe to learn more. The more you learn about candidates, the better prepared you are to decide who is the right person to hire. Ask when and where what they describe occurred. Encourage them with “tell me more.” Seek clarification when required. Point out inconsistencies.

Plan how you will assess candidates: Create an assessment tool that consists of a rubric against which you assess candidates. In this way, you will be prepared to compare candidates against standards you established prior to the interview and not to each other.

Prepare to take notes: Create a note-taking form that includes your initial request for information, followup questions and the assessment rubric. 

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Participants in Interview Right to Hire Right workshops will have opportunities to craft and receive feedback on questions they can use the next time they have a vacancy to file. Contact Nelson to schedule a workshop for your leadership team (nmscott@telus.net or 780-232-3828).

Getting better advice on where to eat and who to hire

On the surface, online restaurant reviews and reference checks would seem to have little in common.

Search for “Top 10 restaurants” or “Best places to eat” for any city and Google will deliver numerous lists of local eateries. 

There is no consistency among these lists. One dining establishment may appear on one list but not on others. Well-known fast-food franchises appear right next to places where one dines only when celebrating a special event or when on an expense account.

How can this be, and what has it got to do with hiring the right people?

The reason that restaurants show up on some lists and not others is because everyone judges restaurants against different criteria. Lists are a valuable guide to making dining choices only if those compiling the lists share the same criteria as you do. Lists are useless if their criteria differ from yours.

The same dynamic comes into play when managers offer their opinion when asked about  former employees by someone conducting reference checks.

As is the case of restaurant reviews, most references come from people we don’t know—strangers. We don’t know the performance standards against which they gauge staff members.

Basing hiring decisions on the opinions of strangers can be more harmful than when dining plans are based on an internet Top 10 restaurant list. 

Following the advice of strangers about where to eat may result in an upset stomach for a few hours. Hiring decisions based on the opinions of strangers can lead to headaches for years to come.

The challenge in obtaining valuable information during reference checks is not limited to not knowing how managers assess people they once supervised. 

When asked by a former employee to be a reference, managers will frequently ask them, “What would you like me to say when they call me?” This leads to references that are “scripted” by the candidates themselves.

When you call the candidate’s former manager, they recite the message as the candidate asked them to deliver it. If pressed, they may find it difficult to provide examples from what they observed that supports the opinions they are expressing.

When you are receiving this type of information, it is natural to conclude that checking references is a waste of time. Yet it can be a valuable tool in your hiring tool kit. But you must ask questions that will yield information that’s useful when making your hiring decisions.

Avoid asking for the former employer’s opinion and instead inquire about the candidate’s on-the-job performance. Your questions should be similar to those asked when interviewing the candidate, whether it is about dealing with an upset customer, setting priorities or resolving a conflict with a co-worker.

Obtaining evidence of how the candidate performed in the past will expose clues to how they will perform in the future. You are better able to predict if they will be successful. That should lead you to make better hiring decisions than if you relied on what strangers say when asked, “Would you hire this person again?”

And if you are still looking for dining advice, ignore the online recommendations of strangers and ask friends who have similar culinary tastes to yours.