I hate the whole concept of references. I don’t want to ask a favor from someone in my past. I don’t want to keep contact info for former bosses or co-workers.
Our society is like:
Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.
Have personal responsibility.
Your success or your failure is 100% due to your good or poor choices.
Employers: “By the way, you are going to need help from some strangers in your past in order to get a job with our company.”
Companies are constantly trying to figure out how to pay workers less. I would absolutely take less money if the hiring process didn’t have so much hoop-jumping. How has capitalism not figured that one out yet?
Not to mention, sometimes, the references are not as good as the applicant imagines.
Those are always interesting moments.
I was going to say–not everyone is as glowing about the person asking for a reference as they would like to believe. Not that there are juicy stories that I have to tell or anything, just enough shade that it was enough to get the org to reconsider offers.
I don’t know that I’d say it’s “juicy”… but we had an applicant insist we call a certain reference. We were going to skip it, because it was their ex-boss; and because their ex-boss fired them. At best that’s going to be smoke getting blown up our asses.
The ex box told us exactly why they got fired and exactly why we shouldn’t hire them.
Let’s just say keep it in your pants.