Job Search Blog

As long as we are talking about references, I wanted to mention something that happened a month or so ago and happens a number of times a year… and it’s a great lesson of what not to do

DO NOT put your references on your resume. We had a candidate that had his references on his resume. He sent the resume into a perspective employer (not our client). The employer liked the resume and the places the person had worked.

Instead of calling a candidate for an interview, however, the hiring authority called two of the candidate’s references and invited them in for an interview. The candidate had not only put the names of his references on his resume but also their titles and phone numbers. One of the references called the candidate and actually told him how he had gotten the interview. The candidate was not very happy. He mentioned to us he thought it was very unethical for a hiring authority to do this kind of thing. Not true!

It is nothing of the sort. The hiring authority is trying to find the best candidate he can, anyway he can and your references are as good a place as any to get them.

The lesson is, don’t put your references on your resume.

This is a $150 million company that’s managed to survive with the CEO and two or three salespeople that have come and gone. Both the CEO and the newly promoted CRO ( who got promoted out of  engineering because the CEO had done such a miserable job at managing sales and the sales force which kept turning over) decided that they really needed to find a top-notch VP (A+ player) to really reorganize and build a sales organization.

The CEO calls and communicates the company’s sincere commitment to finding the right person. She states that neither she nor the CRO really like or know sales, but in order for them to grow they are going to have to find a really first-class VP. Our firm goes through more than 100 candidates and comes up with five excellent people, who the CEO and CRO interview.

The CRO carries on most of the communications with the two final candidates and it seems like the CRO does most of the interviewing and coordinating of the candidates. He does a fairly decent job of communicating what he “thinks” the company needs to each one of the candidates. Unfortunately, after they claim they are going to have the two candidates back they start postponing the interviewing process. They came up with all kinds of excuses… COVID-19, vacations, business trips. But they keep telling us that the two candidates are the best they’ve seen and (words that always seemed dubious to us, “We’re going to hire one of these guys.”)

What had been fairly open communications between the candidates and the CRO all of a sudden started dying down. The candidates would email and call and eventually get no returns of either kind.

This goes on for about three weeks. We tried to explain in emails and voicemails to both the CEO and the CRO that our candidates are losing interest, mostly because they are feeling neglected. Both are employed and, although not that unhappy, very interested in the position. Or at least they were!

So much time elapsed that the CRO decided he wanted to interview the candidates again. He didn’t really say that he wanted to “start over” but said that he wanted to get “re-refreshed” with the candidates. His lack of experience in the real sales world was showing. And, his fear of making a mistake was too.

One of the candidates was pretty irritated about the whole thing. He agreed to talk with them again but he certainly wasn’t feeling loved or that hiring him…or anyone, was a high priority. The second candidate seemed just as interested as he had been before, but told us that the situation at his company had changed and he wasn’t sure how that change was going to affect him.

We communicated all of this to the CRO. We had written the CRO and the CEO a number of weeks before this that when things drag on like this, candidates not only lose interest but the company appears indecisive about making decisions. They both acknowledged our warnings, but didn’t really change their activity. They told us that hiring someone was important, but they certainly didn’t act like it.

They brought both candidates back. Unfortunately, the CRO basically interviewed them as though he had never met with them before. He asked the same questions he had asked almost a month previously and both candidates were beginning to feel like they were wasting their time and really could not see much point in the interviews. He then informed them that they would both have to speak to the CEO..again.

Believe it or not, the CEO told us that she wanted to speak with the candidates again but couldn’t for at least two weeks. We tried to explain to the CRO directly that this was just getting to be too much and we ran the risk of losing both candidates.

And that is what happened. The first candidate told us that he just didn’t feel like the organization was committed to finding a good candidate. His assumption was that they were going to treat him as an employee the way they were treating him as a candidate. (It was very hard to argue with that.) The second candidate’s situation at his company changed to the point where, since he wasn’t really excited about the new opportunity, he was going to wait and see what was going to happen at his present firm.

As of Friday, we don’t really know what our client is going to do. Experience has taught us that they will either start all over or postpone the whole thing because they have created such a mess, they really don’t look good. My bet is that there is a 75% chance they will postpone the whole thing. Leaders in companies, especially inexperienced ones, simply don’t like doing interviewing and hiring. They obviously don’t do it well, look poor at doing it and are just plain afraid. When most folks are subtly afraid, they do nothing. They avoid the elephant in the room.

This is one way of losing a great VP candidate!

Dear Mr. or Ms. hiring authority,

Thank you for the time you’re taking to interview me, but could you please help us both in the interviewing process?

Please don’t ask me to “tell me about myself,” because I don’t know what that means to you.

Tell me what you’re looking for in a candidate and then let me explain to you why I would be good for your job.

Act like interviewing me is important. Please don’t answer the phone, carry on conversations with other people, read your emails, look at your phone while you are interviewing me.

Please take notes, so I don’t have to repeat myself three or four times.

Please, let’s not have general conversations about anything except you, your company and the job you are expecting to fill. Going off on tangents that have nothing to do with the company or the job don’t help either one of us.

Please don’t keep me in the interview for an hour and a half when you know in the first 15 minutes that you’re probably not going to hire me.

Please don’t tell me that I’m a wonderful candidate when you know that I’m not.

Please don’t tell me that you’re going to call me in the next day or two when you know you aren’t.

When I ask you how I stack up to the other candidates that you’ve interviewed, please tell me where I actually stand.

Give me a realistic idea of what the priority of hiring somebody really is. Please don’t tell me you’ve been looking for six months but now you really need to do something about it.

Please don’t tell me how lousy all of the other candidates have been, because I know that you’re going to say the same thing about me.

If you tell me that most of the people that work with you are lousy employees, I really don’t want the job.

If you really think I’m a very good candidate for the job, sell me on why I ought to come to work for you and your firm.

Please realize that “time kills deals.” The longer you appear indecisive, the less trust I have in you being a good manager and your company being a good place to work.

If you have lousy reviews on Glassdoor or Google, be ready to explain about them.

If you are not sure about some things about the job, please be honest about it. I understand when someone says “I don’t know.” I don’t expect you to know everything about the job

If you need clarification about my experience or anything we discussed in the interview, please don’t hesitate to make sure you really understand.

If I ask you about my strengths and weaknesses in your eyes, please tell me. I can take it.

If you’re not going to hire me and you know it, tell me. I may very well ask you the reasons so it will make me better in other situations, but please be honest with me.

Please have a very specific procedure about how the hiring will take place so, if you do think I’m a good candidate, I know what to expect.

Please treat me the way you would want to be treated. Please remember that somewhere down the line, I might be interviewing you for a position.

Thank you again for your time.

Sincerely,

A Sincere Job Candidate

It happened twice this week, and happens all the time. Candidates are asked a reasonable question and give not only Too Much Information, but way too much information and it ends up costing them the job. We had a well-qualified candidate for senior-level inside sales manager’s job. She made it past the first interview and when she went to the second interview for some reason or another she felt compelled to explain to the female hiring manager why she wore a wig. It was a very expensive wig and unless you look closely you couldn’t even see that she wore one. She went on and on, according to the hiring authority, for five or 10 minutes about the condition of her hair. It had absolutely nothing to do with the job… nada! On top of thinking that the conversation got weird, the hiring authority totally lost interest in the candidate. And what’s worse, the candidate didn’t even detect it.

The second situation had to do with a very well-qualified V.P. This guy is in his late 40’s and has 20 years of solid experience and you think you would know better. Somewhere in the conversation with the CEO of one of our clients, he started talking about all of the problems he was having with his 16-year-old. Now most of us who have raised kids know parents always have problems with a 16-year-old, especially a male 16-year-old. For some crazy reason our candidate felt so relaxed with the CEO, he told the CEO about his kid’s problems at school, his kid’s challenge with hanging around the wrong kinds of other kids and, can you believe this, his kid’s drug problem. End of interview! Although the CEO had a tremendous amount of empathy for the candidate’s situation he didn’t feel comfortable at all hiring someone who might be so distracted by his 16-year-old that he might not travel or work like he should.

Some years back, we had a very accomplished female candidate. She had recently gone through a rather ugly divorce and didn’t mind sharing her woes over the divorce with prospective employers. We warned her not to do this under any circumstances. Many people however in situations like that can’t help themselves. She made it past three interviews with one of our clients and was a finalist. In fact, we were told it was hers to lose. In the final interview with the executive VP she ended up telling her personal story. After the interview she told us that even though she had gone into her personal story more than she would like, the hiring VP totally understood her situation. The executive VP told our candidate that she had recently gone through the same kind of ugly divorce and they spent 20 minutes commiserating. Our candidate knew that, this time, talking about her ugly divorce only helped her, because the executive VP really understood and empathized with her because he executive VP had just gone through the same kind of ordeal. Unfortunately, she was totally wrong. The Executive Vice President wasn’t going to hire her because, according to the EVP, she knew what a basket case someone is when they go through that kind of thing and since it had just happened to her she knew, from experience, that a person going through that ordeal wouldn’t be focused for at least a year.

Here’s the lesson:Don’t give TOO MUCH INFORMATION !!!It will work against you

It’s unbelievable that I’m even going to have to go over this again. If you are looking for a job DON’T SMOKE DOPE or do any kinds of drugs.

This week we have a candidate who is going for a drug test after having accepted a job at a very conservative company. The company informs him that he is going to have to take a drug test and he tells our recruiter that he’s very worried about it because he’s been smoking marijuana. He’s concerned that the marijuana is going to show up in the drug test and he isn’t going to get the job.

So, I guess you ask, “How could someone be so stupid as to be smoking dope or doing drugs while they are looking for a job, knowing that it’s likely that the people who are going to try to hire them are going to give them a drug test?” I have absolutely no idea how to answer that question.

Simple lesson: don’t smoke dope or do drugs! Even if you arenot looking for  a job…it ain’t good for you!

Since 1986, Psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin, has published a number of studies that prove that if people going through a difficult or challenging time will simply write about their experience on a daily basis, they will deal with their emotional stress much better than those who don’t. These kinds of studies have even shown that this kind of journaling even boosts a person’s immune system.

Pennnebaker found that if people only write 15 minutes a day, their attitude towards everything becomes more positive. The immediate aftermath of these experiments created sadness and emotional distress. But over a period of time, Pennebaker found that 70% of the subjects said they understood themselves better and were more comfortable with the experience they wrote about. Since his initial study, hundreds of experiments like this have been done around the world and the results are that people who write about some of their most emotional experiences become more understanding about their experience and themselves.

What’s even more important is that people who have been laid off from their jobs who practice journaling about their experience deal with having to look for a job more easily and, most important, get hired more quickly. In one study, within three months of doing this kind of writing, 27% of the unemployed subjects had found jobs compared to only 5% of the subjects who had not done the journaling. By seven months, 57% of the people who had done journaling had found a new job, which was three times that of the people who had not done the writing.

Even Pennebaker admits that he’s not sure why this kind of journaling makes such a big difference in the attitude and results of people’s efforts. Apparently the act of writing about the emotional strain of looking for a job speeds up the ability to put the incident in perspective and deal with it more effectively.

In all of the books that I’ve written about finding a job as well as in my online program The Job Search Solution I have always recommended that people write about the experience they go through while they are looking for a job. But I have to admit that my discovery of Pennebaker’s studies have reinforced my suggestions.

There are 18 million people looking for work in the United States today. That’s a lot of emotions. The people that begin journaling and actually write about their experience are going to deal with the emotional strain more easily. And if Pennebaker and those that have followed him are right, they will find a job more quickly and easily. Up until now, my advice was simply anecdotal.

Bluntly, the why of this doesn’t matter. If it works, and I believe that it does, everyone looking for a job should be journaling every day.

John is really a really good salesperson. But he has created a real problem for himself. He spent the first seven years of his career with the firm that significantly underpaid him. So, three years ago when he decided to leave them, he made a commitment to “make up” for the fact that he had been, or felt he had been, underpaid.

In the kind of business he is in he hit the market at a great time and got three or four job offers….even rare then. He decides to go to work for the firm that offered him the most money. He was insistent on making up for his perception of his being underpaid. The company that offered him a job back then paid him $30,000 a year more than any other offer he got. Obviously, very significant! And, at the time, no one could really blame him for taking the job.

Often times, though, it never crosses a job seekers mind to ask, “what’s wrong with this picture?… Why would someone pay me $30,000 more than anyone else?” Most candidates always attribute that kind of offer to their dazzling brilliance, amazing potential and phenomenal personality. They rarely think objectively and wonder “something’s wrong here.”

The people that hired John did, indeed, need him to manage one very significant, major account for them. He did a great job…. until, nine months into the gig this “loyal, major account” decided to stop using the services of both John and his employer. John was hired to manage one, special account and the company didn’t have any other job for him, so when the company lost the account, they laid John off.

John knew that he was being a little overpaid for the job he was doing, but, after all he did do an excellent job for his company until the client change their mind. Now, John wanted to find another job making the same kind of money are more than he had been making. This approach automatically eliminated 90% of the opportunities that John might have in his line of sales because most of the people in his profession were willing to pay him the kind of base salary and commission he had been making.

So, John found a company that needed him really badly to establish a brand-new division in their company. They were willing to pay him a higher salary and commission than most anybody else because they needed help in establishing the new division. So, the question of “why would a company page on that kind of money?” was answered, “because they needed him to establish this new division and they were willing to pay more than the job was really worth to get him.”

One year into the new division, John’s new company decided they didn’t want to be in the business that John was doing. So, they laid him off. Now, John has had two jobs in two years.

Last year, John was on the market again, got three decent job offers. He decides to go to work for an organization in the business that he was in who was building a brand-new office in Dallas. They not only paid him an extremely high salary, but they also gave him a very high nonrecoverable draw. John did an excellent job for them. He was making a lot of money.

Unfortunately, the company hired a branch manager and a couple of others salespeople in the same manner they hired John. They wanted to establish an office quickly, so they overpaid every body to build the office. This is not an uncommon thing for companies to do. However, Covid came along. The company John worked for lost one of its largest national accounts that, incidentally, didn’t have anything to do with the Dallas office, but the Dallas office wasn’t making a lot of money… they were overpaying every body to get jumpstarted and since the office had only been open for a year, it couldn’t be expected to make a lot of money, so they closed the Dallas office, laying everyone in the office off.

So, now John needs a job and he is asking for the same amount of money and draw that he got one year ago to help open an office. He’s had three jobs in three years and asking for the same amount of money he was getting pre-Covid. Even though all of these three companies “left” him, it still doesn’t look good. He can’t really share that the reason he went to these places was because they were the “highest bidder.” People really like the guy but the whole thing is hard to sell.

The best of the firms he is speaking with aren’t going to pay as high as he was making. They don’t have to in this market. Now they are concerned if they hire him at what the market value is, like 20% less than what he was making, he’ll stay with them for a short while and then if a higher bidder comes along, he’ll leave. The truth is he couldn’t afford to do that. John has to be at this next gig at least four or five years. So, unless somebody “leaves him” he isn’t going anywhere. But it is really hard to convince prospective employer of that.

So, it’s really obvious why it isn’t always a good idea to go to work for the highest bidder. Two of these people paid John more than what the market dictated because there was a risk in the job. No company ever tells anybody that, “we’d like to try this for a year but if it doesn’t work were going to close the office.” I will admit that these are very difficult and precarious times and the probability of this kind of thing happening again isn’t very great. It’s all real unfortunate.

Whenever the job seeker gets an offer that’s substantially more than the rest of the market, most of the time it goes to their head and they think it’s because they are so damn good. But every job seeker in a situation like this, even though they need the money and want the money needs to take a deep breath and ask themselves, “what’s the risk this situation? These guys are paying me more money than the market really would bear…why?”

This kind of situation might be worth the risk. But taking a job because of it has the highest economic payoff doesn’t necessarily make it a good job. Beware of the highest bidder!

Last week I discussed how hiring authorities are being “shape shifted” by today’s economy and now it’s important for us to discussThe shape shifting of today’s job seeker’s world. Here is what we’re hearing from candidates:

• “I never thought I’d ever get laid off… I’ve been here for 15 years. We were told last week that we really didn’t have anything to worry about. And then they lay me off. They tell me it’s because of Covid. But that was two months ago!”
• “It’s almost impossible to get an interview. I’ve never had this much trouble.”
• “Now look, I’ve been making $100,000 base salary and I can’t go below that.” (The candidate’s office was closed because of Covid and the profession that he is in is shrinking and on top of that he negotiated that $100,000 salary six months ago when he took the new job. The salary on his previous job was $80,000. Back then [short time ago] the market was hot. Now, he’ll be lucky to get an interview let alone a $100,000 base salary.)
• “We have no idea what the smart thing to do is. We don’t know if the kids are going to be back in school, what day care is going to look like, whether one of us is going to have to stay home if the kids are home. So I know I need a job but I’m going to have to put off interviewing for another few weeks until we can sort this out.”
• “They told me they let me know about the offer three weeks ago and I still haven’t heard from them.” (Organizations are just plain scared.)
• “They checked eight of my references and still can’t decide?”
• “They said they have interviewed 32 candidates and still aren’t sure of what they’re looking for.”
• “Well, since my unemployment has run out I guess it’s time for me to look for a job…how hard do you think it’s going to be?” (We wanted to ask, “what planet are you living on? Haven’t you been reading the papers or listening to the news?”)
• “I knew it was a start up, but they said they had plenty of money. Their definition of plenty of money and my definition of plenty of money was a lot different.”
• “I like the job, but we have to work from home. We’ve got three little kids and I can’t imagine how I can get anything done working from home.”
• “Ever since we all started working from home there just plain hasn’t been the camaraderie and culture there was when we were all together. Cliques have started to form and everybody is beginning to mistrust everybody. Frankly, it’s just more lonely working this way and I don’t like it. They told us they were going to continue this way of working till the first of the year, so I want out.”
•  “If I can’t make at least $70,000, it’s not worth me going to work. I’ll stay home on unemployment.” (Try saying that to a prospective employer!)
• “I’m sick of zoom meetings.”
• One of our employers interviewed a candidate via Skype and said, “I’m not going to hire him. What kind of fool would have comic books on his bookshelf. I saw them when I was interviewing him.”
• “The company you connected me with told me they had a six week interviewing process. Is that true? I like them, but I need to go to work, my company is going broke and I need to go to work faster than six weeks.”
• “After they offered me the job and I accepted, they called and said that they canceled the job. Can they do that? I’m going to call my attorney and see if I have any legal grounds.” (You don’t. Except under very rare circumstances the resend and of a job offer has no legal consequences.)
• “After three months of interviewing, they told me they were not going to fill the job.”

We’ve been hearing multiple versions of these kinds of things for two months now. I imagine it’s gonna go on for some time. Every recession we’ve lived through has experienced different aspects of most every statement you’ve heard here. Let’s just face it, life is a mess. It’s a phenomenal series of ups and downs that can come in just about any time in one’s life.

It’s how we deal with these things that is going to make a difference. I’ve always estimated that there are at least 14 negative things that happen in a job search for every positive thing. And people simply have to get used to that. It might be more in this market.

There is really no such thing as a new normal. There really never has been. Even when the economy was really strong and things were rocking along famously from an economic point of view there really wasn’t a normal. But when the economy is good and companies are making money and jobs are easier to find we like to think it’s “normal.” And, it’s certainly a lot easier to deal with when everybody’s making money.

I get asked at least three or four times a day what the market is like. This week, I will attempt to describe what’s going on with employers and next week I will discuss what we see going on with job seekers. Here’s what’s happening with companies trying to hire and the hiring authorities:

• Everyone is operating with doubt, uncertainty and fear. Companies are not doing as well as they did. The lockdown, which was a terrible mistake… Just terrible, put everyone in a fearful and psychologically lonely mood. Companies and the people in them were not around each other and had no positive, psychological reinforcement.
• Some companies are still totally working from home. More about that in a moment, but the isolation fuels the “I’m not sure what were doing or how were doing it and even if we need to hire somebody I don’t know how to go about doing it. I can’t seem to get any direction.”
• If companies have taken new initiatives that look like they are going to take a long time to develop to be profitable, they are very often pulling the plug and laying the people off that they hired to initiate them.
• Many employers are laying off and furloughing people (in my 47 years of doing this I’ve never heard the term “furloughed” applied to employees). If they can get away with it, they are spreading the work load those people had around to other people. For instance, many of our clients have laid off or furloughed $60,000, $70,000 and $80,000 executive assistants.They will try to spread that workload around to the other people doing a like job but who are only making $45,000 or $50,000 a year.
• The above situation will apply to sales departments, accounting departments, engineering departments… Just about any department where a company thinks they can save some money. They will often postpone increasing the staff until other people in the department become so disgruntled with having to do the extra work, they threatened to leave or, if they have a phenomenal amount of courage, they do leave
• .Hiring authorities have a tendency in this kind of market to only hire when they absolutely have to. Forget “expansion” positions. They are going the hire only when their desperate and they’re going to do it as economically as they can. For instance, if they had a salesperson at $125,000 base salary, who left or got let go, they’ll try to hire the replacement at a $90,000 base salary and they will only  do that when the territory gets so neglected no one has time to cover it.
• When companies and the people in them do interview, their mantra is “We don’t want to make a mistake, we don’t want to make a mistake, we don’t want to make a mistake, we don’t want to make a mistake, we don’t want to make a mistake etc.” They drag the interviewing process out for ridiculous amount of time, having an innumerable number of people involved in the interviewing process who shouldn’t be and postpone making a decision until a just absolutely have to.
• When they do hire, candidates should expect an elongation process and often, just plain odd endeavors. One of our clients asked six candidates for eight business references each after an initial interview. One candidate was absolutely furious because he lined up the eight references, prepared them for the employer to call them and the employer never did.
• Companies will start interviewing then stop interviewing then start interviewing then stop interviewing and maybe never hire anybody at all. When the economy is like this, it’s not uncommon for companies and the people in them to suffer from “paralysis by analysis.”
• Companies will often let “A players” go out of knee-jerk reaction to the rest of the economy.
• Leaders in these companies will forget that they ought to be interviewing “A players” all of the time… whether they have an opening or not. Again, it’s a knee-jerk reaction of “were not hiring!”
• The doubt about this pandemic causes paralysis.
• Companies are beginning to realize that remote work is a bit of an oxymoron. Many companies are beginning to realize that working remotely is really not sustainable.
• When a company and people in it operate out of “fear of loss” rather than “vision of gain” fear driven productivity is not good. This is especially true when people are working alone.
• Zoom meetings just aren’t the same as being with a group of people. Collaboration in one space is simply deficient. Remote collaboration of a group can take days. Problems that might be easy to solve with a group physically together, can become a logistical challenge remotely.
• Body language and casual personal interaction can’t happen remotely.
• We’ve had a number of candidates get hired remotely and now they’re being trained remotely and they really aren’t feeling an emotional bond to the company and the job. As one candidate said, it’s very antiseptic..
• When leaders are asked in the remote interviewing process about career development and the path to upward mobility, they simply don’t really have any idea how it’s going to work.
• The socialization process that goes along with getting to know people by working with them in proximity and as a group is negligible.
• Most leaders in most companies don’t know how to address promotion criteria.

As I’ve mentioned before, every recession has created its own challenges. I’m certain there will be many other unforeseen ones as our economy evolves.

Next week will discuss some of the issues facing candidates.

Hey, you employers out there… HR people, consultants, administrative folks and even the employers that are doing the hiring (who should be doing the reference checking) don’t ever, ever, ever, ever check a present candidate’s employer as a reference. Even if the candidate tells you that it is okay to check their present employer as a reference…don’t do it.

Unfortunately, one of our clients was interviewing one of our candidates as a finalist. He was a great candidate and our client knew it. They asked our candidate for a number of references, including the name of his present employer. On their form, they asked if the names of the people could be contacted. The candidate clearly filled in a little box that designated that the present employer should NOT be contacted.

Unfortunately, the human resources/recruiter, who, by the way, is very nice and well meaning, did not detect the box. I have to admit that the box was extremely small and it was very easy to overlook. The candidate gave the name of one of the people he worked with as someone who could be contacted regarding a reference. (I still would not agree with this. I will explain later.)

Well, the human resources department called candidate’s direct supervisor, explained that the candidate was applying for a job with the company and asked for an employment reference. OMG! Amazingly enough, the candidate’s present employer gave him an extremely good reference. The guy is an absolutely excellent worker, but he is really under employed in the job that he has now and his present boss knows that. The job is relatively challenging but nowhere near the potential that the candidate has. The new position that we found the candidate is tremendously challenging and, as much as anything else, would double the guy’s income.

Of course the candidate called, really upset. He actually found out about the phone call from one of the people that overheard it, but never heard from his present boss. (They are mostly working remotely and so the candidate’s present boss is not within proximity of the candidate.) In fact, fortunately, the candidate never heard from his present boss about the incident.

The candidate did call our client as upset and as mad as he could be. At first, our client asked, “What’s the big deal? You put that person’s name and phone number on your application.” The candidate explained that he also marked the little box that stated, “do not contact!” Upon seeing this, the person who checked the reference became phenomenally apologetic. The candidate, still upset, couldn’t do much of anything but wait and see if he was going to get fired.

He didn’t! So far, no one said anything to him at all about it. Our client went through with the offer and, fortunately, the candidate has received it.

The apology by the HR person was very “coolly” received. The candidate was obviously upset, but what was he going to do? At the time, he was simply going to have to wait and see if he was going to get canned. After the offer was made, the CEO of our client called the candidate and apologized to him. The CEO was extremely gracious and the candidate had calmed down by then. At the time, he had still not spoken to his direct boss.

So, here are the lessons. If you’re a candidate, you might want to give the name of your present company as your employer, but don’t give the direct supervisor’s name or phone number. Our candidate did the right thing by marking the box, “do not contact,” but, I wouldn’t recommend running that risk. Make it really, really, really clear that your present employer is not to be contacted. And, the best way to do that might be to give your present company’s name but not the name of your supervisor.

This may be obvious to most people, but just in case people aren’t aware, companies can be held legally responsible for causing someone to lose their job. It doesn’t really matter how fair or unfair any of us think it might be, none of us can cause someone to lose their job. We can be held legally responsible. And only God knows the number of lawsuits that have come about because of mistakes like this.

Secondly, a hiring organization should NEVER check the reference of the candidate’s present employer, NO MATTER WHAT. Even if the candidate gives the hiring authority permission to do it, the hiring organization should not initiate that kind of call. Relationships change rapidly between employees and employers. Even if a candidate says that he is on his way out and it’s okay to check with his present employer about a reference, that is going to be a very vague line of defense if the candidate loses their job because of a reference check.

Now, if the candidate thinks that his present employer will be willing to give him or her a good reference, then tell the candidate to have their present boss give you a call and offer a reference. Make a candidate have his present employer initiate the call if that’s appropriate. It’s really simple.

I wouldn’t even recommend checking with the peers of an employed candidate. Relationships can change and no matter how wonderful candidates think their relationships are with their peers, their peers can turn on them in a heartbeat.

I had two sales candidates come to interview with me together a number of years ago. They both worked at the same company and were both upset with what was going on and both decided to leave. Since they were good friends, they decided to come see me together. After interviewing each one of them, I told them both, separately, that it would be a really good idea if they didn’t communicate about each other’s job search with each other just to keep things from getting complicated.

Of course, both these guys thought they knew better and since they were close enough friends, what I told them wouldn’t matter. Well, one of them got promoted to a managerial position and all of a sudden his best buddy, best pal, best friend was his subordinate. The first thing he did was to fire his best buddy, best pal and best friend. He explained it real simply. Now that he had a group sales quota to meet, he couldn’t afford to have anybody on his team that was actively looking for a job. He had his own job to protect as a manager, so he fired his friend.

We all have enough problems with running our businesses. We don’t need to create problems for ourselves. Checking someone’s present employment reference isn’t a good idea.