Resources

Your reference check is a comedy sketch—and the punchline is your candidate pool.

🚨 Basic Recruiting Stuff, Week 13 🚨

Welcome to Week 13 of my ‘Basic Recruiting Stuff’ series—your weekly dose of recruiting fundamentals, common pitfalls, and practical solutions from nearly two decades in the search business.

💥 This Week’s Focus: Reference Checks that Actually Matter 💥

✅ What Should Happen:
You pick up the phone and talk to real leaders who actually supervised your candidate. No “just the dates” handholding, no flimsy survey monkey links. Instead, you get straight talk about impact, fit, and the honest messiness of real performance. Every call brings out not just the resume facts, but war stories—how they handled chaos, impacted people, and lived the culture. Done right, reference checks give clients a close-up view, not a blurry LinkedIn endorsement.

🚩 What Usually Happens:
The average staffing shop treats references like a forced chore. “The Work Number,” anyone? Or a peer reference “because my boss and I didn’t really see eye to eye”—if you even get human contact at all. Candidates dodge by claiming former leaders never handed out their cell phone or conveniently are “unreachable.” References get rubber-stamped, phoned in, sometimes by text, and leave clients guessing who they’re really hiring—and why it’s always a surprise week three.

💡 Why It Matters:
Nailing this means true trust built BEFORE the offer. Leadership gains third-party context, nuanced detail, and honest feedback—so everyone’s set up for less ramp, less attrition, and better return on every hire. When reference checks are real, onboarding is clean, and performance jumps the runway—because fit was never a mystery in the first place.

🛠️ The ATS Approach:
We don’t tick boxes—we interrogate with purpose. Our Asymmetric Reference Protocol requires a real dialogue with multiple leaders—managers, subordinates, and peers who speak to impact and how the candidate will stack up against the company’s real culture and role expectations. Our references are actionable intelligence, not empty ritual. It’s why clients say “After our first search I burned my vendor list.” ATS eradicates incompetence—delivering only the real deal, every time.

🎯 The Takeaway:
If your reference checks are a punchline, you ARE the joke—and your next ‘bad hire’ story is coming soon.

#BasicRecruitingStuff #AsymmetricTalent