- Harvard Business Review article on the assessment of best practices in which the authors said, “Poor practice: Conducting inadequate (or no) reference checks. Best practice: Conducting detailed reference checks.” I also recommend listening to their 14 min podcast here, where at minute 9:11 and 12:40 they explain the aforementioned point.
-Leading books on recruiting methods such as Topgrading, a well known and respected method for recruiting, is fundamentally based on two core methods: the interview process and a proper reference check. Lou Adler’s “Hire with your head” Performance based hiring said it simply: “Here’s a basic rule about reference checking: that’s not 100 percent true, but you should follow it (perform it) 100 percent of the time.”
- If you question HR practitioners and want to get more validation from business people, watch Marissa Mayer, V.P. of Search Product and User Experience at Google here in an interview and at minute 42:10 answer this question: “When you are hiring new people [at Google], is there an X factor that you are looking for?“ She replies: “ We did a regression test on what was the best predictor of performance with the interview score, the references, their background,… and we basically found that their background and references are the best predictors…”. Watch for yourself here.

- If you are in a startup watch this one.

You may find this to be all nice and good, but may simply not have the time to do it. I would challenge your view and say that you simply can’t afford not to do it. With the Reference check 2.0 you can perform a very powerful online version of the reference check by taking only 2 minutes of your time. Listen to the feedback of some of our users here. In short, reference checking went through a disillusion period for many when they had to find new ways to get to the truth. Now with the help of social networking and online automation, there is no way not to perform it anymore.

We cannot agree more, and this is why we have made the reference check process easy for hiring organizations to perform. With our talent checkup, individuals can remove those blinders grow and prove their worth to employers.

I recommend her book. And of course our 360 tools.

If you are a manager or a recruiter, or more importantly, a member of a new team, then you want and need to know if you are good at what you do.
In business jargon, we call this the quality of hire.
Yet, the core question is: how can you know?

A report conducted by the Newman group posed this question to about 500 staffing professionals, the answers to which resulted in the chart below.

We believe that one metric is missing: the probability of re-hiring an individual. That metric is essentially a net promoting measurement tool for an individual. Think about it for a second: this simple metric (probability of re-hiring) contains it all. If someone is a great contributing team member, you will hire him/her again, if not you will not, with all grading in between. This is what we use at Checkster for our 360 and automated reference checking system. We recommend you add it as a measuring tool to assess your quality of hire, like some of our customers are doing.

See the full article Here.

“Onrec, the only global Online Recruitment Magazine, follows worldwide innovations in the recruiting space. After extensive review of all innovative technologies across the world, we are proud to recognize Checkster as a Game Changing Recruiting Technology,” said RD Whitney, CEO of ONREC.

Full press release here.

Participate in a 4 minute online survey and receive the Best Practices Report for free: Click here.

Details about the survey:
The results of the research study will provide you with the best questions to ask to optimize the reference check process. This will allow you to benchmark your own internal practices.

Checkster is underwriting the cost of this study, “Best Practices in Reference Checking,” as a value-added service to our clients to encourage future product development and contribute to ongoing research in our industry regarding automated, online reference checking solutions.
Privacy is guaranteed and your contact details will not be shared with any other organizations.
All results will remain confidential.

I wrote this article for Kennedy information and you will see how recruiting decisions are made at Google. Leveraging the collective intelligence: mainly relies on two core techniques: interviewing and reference checking. We of course like the collective feedback as we provide tools that just do that, our automated reference check (reference Checkup) and 360 Checkup (simplified 360 feedback tool).

Read full article here.