Preparing the reference to help you
If you have prepared well, you have done excellent work and gone above and beyond to distinguish yourself in reliability, quality, and ethics in every aspect of your studies and extracurriculars, and it is time to use not only the experience but also the reputation and make your move to the professional level.
You’ve applied for a job and you know (or assume) you’ll need “references”.
Before you ask past supervisors for “references”, be sure you understand what the company wants. It is very uncommon for companies to accept, let alone prefer, generic letters of reference submitted with your application or brought to an interview. These are meaningless, as any intelligent applicant would simply filter out the letters that are not sufficiently complimentary.
More likely the company wants a certain number of names they can contact. (There is no need to put “references available on request” on your résumé—the company will assume that to be the case.) If you are invited for an interview, have a list of your references and their contact information on a piece of paper in your briefcase. You might even have a longer list so that you can play it by ear and select the best fitting three or four references once you learn through the interview what type of thing the company most wants to know about you.
Don’t hand over the list of references until you know they want it. They may accept a list before they need it, but if they need it, they will definitely ask for it. If you don’t offer the list, and they don’t ask, it can help you to keep your expectations reasonable.
Generally, the company will call the reference only when they are pretty sure you’re The Hire. The reference is not a salesperson to help them choose between you and another candidate. The reference is not a character witness to convince them that you would be a great gal or guy to have on the team. The role of the reference is for fact-checking the impression they formed based on the interview.
The person who calls your reference will often not be the person who interviewed you. It may not even be an employee of the company. Many companies contract out reference checking to a firm that specializes in this type of investigation. It is a due-diligence process. They are not mulling it over looking for someone to talk them into hiring you. By the time they check your reference, they have decided to hire—unless the references don’t check out.
The reference checkers are looking to confirm that you have the skills and degrees you claimed. Degrees and credentials are so straightforward and yet a minefield for applicants with inaccurate résumés. Reference checkers will be looking to see that you didn’t stop one credit short, or worse, simply attend a non-credit workshop held in rented space at the academic institution you have named (a surprisingly common transgression, rarely successful, and usually unsuccessful with extreme prejudice). Claims of having a certain degree or certificate when one is in the process of earning it are looked on very, very negatively by employers. Indeed, this transgression can lead to cancellation of an accepted offer. That offer you signed when you quit your previous job? In the small print, it almost certainly says that the offer is void if you are not who you said you were.
If you are in the process of completing the last school term and have no reason to doubt that you will graduate on schedule, by all means put in the education section of your résumé that your degree of X is expected at the convocation in Y month. Until the degree has been conferred, however, do not use the degree abbreviation adjacent to your name in the header of the résumé or on a calling card, even with small print “candidate” or “(C)” (the latter being a completely non-standard notation that merely reinforces a suspicion of potential intent to mislead.) If you are enrolled in a certificate program, be forthright that you are pursuing the certificate and have completed X of its Y credits. If the certificate has probationary status such as X-in-training or Associate-Y, then use that status in full, not the name of the status you are working toward. Enrollment in a certification program is not the same as holding a certificate.
So, your application is all above-board and accurate, you’ve had the interview, and they asked for names of people they can contact. You are the top of the candidate list. You probably already have the consent in principle from your references to use their names, and so you gave that information to the company. Now what?
It’s natural that you contact the reference and let them know they might be contacted. Is that enough?
To answer that, we must recall the purpose of reference checking, and consider how you can help the reference benefit you or at least avoid harming you.
The purpose of reference checking, as noted above, is to verify your claims and impressions the company has formed about you. The company, and certainly not the outside contractor calling on their behalf, isn’t interested in freewheeling compliments about your character and temperament, or even your work ethic. They have a predetermined list of questions that they pose to the reference by telephone, complete with follow-up probes. Because companies can only contact me by email, I see their questions in black and white. Don’t expect me to reveal the hidden secrets of reference checking—every list is different.
However, you could likely approximate this list by reflecting on the interview and identifying topics they asked you about. If you were doing the reference checking, what would you verify?
Few interviews nowadays are completely free-form rambling conversations. Companies attempt to compare candidates fairly by giving them a “structured” interview. The interviewer may not sit there with a list of questions to read from, as far as you can tell, but there is likely a predetermined list of questions that correspond to the criteria they will use to rate and compare the candidates. If the interview consists of a friendly chat about a broad-ranging spectrum of business – or worse, personal – topics, there is a good chance your candidacy was not seriously competitive – perhaps it was a courtesy interview because you know someone, or perhaps they have already identified the star candidate. Alternatively, you are dangerously close to a job with a company that lacks structure.
If they are calling your references, they have determined that you are the best match and they want to verify that the impression they formed based on your responses in the interview is borne out by the perceptions of others.
If the interview is over, it may be hard to recall what you discussed, but if the interview is in the future, you can prepare to make sure you do recall. If you don’t think you can remember the whole thing, taking notes during the interview is not a bad idea: if you can give the interview your full attention, jotting key words conveys being attentive and engaged.
When you get in touch with your reference after the interview, tell the reference what information they can provide that will help you.
Think of it this way: You were there at the interview. Your reference was not. How can she know what type of information the company will find favourable to you?
To get the most effective reference for you, it is not enough to inform the reference you have provided their name as a reference or even to identify the company or the job title. What you need to tell the reference is how have you demonstrated the skills required by the job.
Think about the themes that were prioritized in the line of questioning during your interview. Read between the lines of the culture of the company that you picked up during your tour of their facility. Think about the key characteristics you think make you a good fit for the job.
To fact-check your skills and qualifications, the company will often ask the reference questions similar to what you received in the interview: how did the applicant lead peers in a team, for instance, or what types of complex project management did the applicant do? It is not very helpful for your case if the reference just says you were a good team player or had good attention to detail. For these reference statements to be helpful for your case, she has to back it up with examples.
Don’t rely on your reference to recall every wonderful thing you did. Responding to a reference should take 10 minutes (20 if it is a written reference form such as for grad school or a professional program). If it would take the reference half an hour to dredge up memories to come up with examples of your excellence in all of the relevant skills, chances are some of those skills will not be reflected in the reference. Anyone who would be a good reference probably has a head full of other more recent information and a bunch of upcoming things demanding her attention. She may not want to give you an unhelpful reference, but that is what you might get if she doesn’t have the time to take a walk down memory lane.
Don’t just tell the reference what these qualities are: remind the reference of specific examples.
This does not assure you that the reference will parrot your suggestions, particularly if she doesn’t want to overstate your capabilities. The reference will be conscious that her own reputation for good judgement is on the line. You can acknowledge that by recapping the company’s apparent interests, and giving examples of each, such as “They seem to be looking for ABC, which I thought I showed when I did XYZ, which you probably recall”. Do not feel hesitant about providing a few too many examples. In fact, you may feel less self-conscious or boastful if you provide a point-form “example buffet” that cover a few more examples of good, solid performance, rather than feeling pressure to identify a single Nobel-Oscar-Grammy-Tony-Pulitzer-worthy example of excellence. The reference will be able to select the suggestions she is comfortable using. Just don’t provide second-hand examples that your reference would not have had direct knowledge about.
Some references like to receive a copy of the job description you have applied for. Most don’t. Digesting the job description and visualizing themselves in the position of the hiring manager is considerably more work for the reference, and also less reliable for you: it leads to an unfocussed reference rather than a prioritized one. Most references will be relieved if you have digested the job description, picked out the key priorities from the interview discussion, reflected on your skills, and provided to the reference just the resulting highlights not just what the company wants but what you would like the reference to say.
While the specific questions in reference checks vary with the type of position, one common question is about what type of supervision the candidate needs and what type of growth opportunities would benefit him or her. These may be intended as “safe” ways to get a reference talking about the candidate’s weaknesses and find whether there are any red flags. Give the reference some help with this too. What do you hope to learn from this job, and what specific mentoring opportunities came up in your interview discussion?
You will maximize your chance of a helpful reference if you give the reference some talking points. There is no danger that the reference will say anything she is uncomfortable with and she may add other examples. But by providing the talking points, you optimize the chance the reference will have the information she needs to support your case.
Is the professor a good choice of reference? It’s an honour to be nominated, but if you are applying for an industry job, and you had industry experience, use industry references, particularly if two or more years have elapsed. To use a professor as a reference suggests you have not yet established yourself as an independent professional. Many people in industry perceive academia as too abstract, theoretical, and detached from the world of deadlines and profit margins and may actually be unimpressed with academic references. Directly from university, before you have much industry experience, a professor can be a reasonable choice of reference if you worked or volunteered with the professor and she can therefore give a reference that is meaningful in relation to employment and particularly in relation to the type of work that is involved in the job you have applied for. However, a supervisor from a part-time or co-op or even unpaid job could be more persuasive if it demonstrated the professional skills the employer wants to verify. Employers take the degree at face value and trust that you can do all of the skills entailed in that degree and, unless you were “top of your class”, employers rarely differentiate levels of academic attainment. They have very little interest in your good attendance in class and your acceptable marks in individual courses or your work in unrelated academic pursuits. Even if you believe the academic reference is relevant, you may need to work to make the relevance obvious to the hiring manager. For every ten times a student tells me I’ve been nominated as a reference, I probably receive one reference check.
However, all of the above advice will equip me give a more helpful reference when I am contacted, and the same advice will almost certainly support your past supervisors to give you a more helpful reference as well.
