As it is rightly said that being cautious is the greatest risk of all, now it is up to us to figure out how cautious is too cautious.
Employees have been considered the most valuable asset and a reference check is one of the most reliable ways to determine whether your candidate will be an asset to you or a liability. A candidate’s references don’t only shed some light on their career history but also on their nature and behaviour, relationships at work with their colleagues and proactivity along with the quality of their work.
And this is exactly what happened with Nitin, a young and passionate boy who worked hard during his tenure with his previous employers. However, despite his strenuous efforts his superior took advantage of his naive nature and stole the credit for the work done by him. At the time of the annual appraisal, he didn't even receive anything close to what he had worked for which discouraged him massively.
Hopeless and disappointed he decided to bring this to the attention of top management, while it did help the management to see the unethical behaviour of Nitin's superiors; it further led to a spoilt relationship between Nitin and his superiors. His superiors started harassing him at work and abusing him constantly, frustrated once again Nitin reported this to the top management but to his surprise, the management did not act on it at all.
To end this cycle of abuse, Nitin eventually decided to quit the organisation. He left the organization with proper notice and applied for a different organization and got selected. His selection was subjective to his reference check process.
During the hiring process, the references given by Nitin of his previous workplace didn’t work in his favour, as his superiors completely denied to grant him the recognition of the work done by him. Such spiteful behaviour exists in corporate because of an atmosphere of cutthroat competition. However, the question at the table is even if necessary how ethical are these traditional reference checks?
Let’s go through some merits and demerits of reference checking in the corporate in order to get a valid answer to these questions.
Pros
Checking references makes the employers aware of impartial information about the candidate further allowing them to take a neutral decision in terms of the candidate’s selection. While a candidate may provide a list of people to the employer to get references from, it is often the case that these individuals are biased and are bound to speak highly of the candidate.
Checking references makes the process of hiring a candidate a lot faster and easier hence is considered significant by fast-paced organizations that don’t tend to spend a lot of time in selection processes. The process of checking reference further acts as a filter to maintain the quality of the firm by selecting candidates who are likely to adding value to the organisation.
Checking references further eliminates negligence and biases of the employer or of the person involved in hiring. The hiring process is often corrupted with nepotism and biases making the person involved in hiring more likely to hire someone from their own religious, racial or gender group over someone else despite the lack of experience and knowledge required for the position, but a situation is avoided by reference checking as impartiality can easily be detected in a case like this.
Cons
The process of reference checking is not entirely dependable as there are several loopholes. As most reference checks involve the efficiency of a candidate from different people, the employer is more likely to receive diverse and subjective comments from different people and in some cases the inability of referent to refer something about a candidate, therefore, making the process highly unreliable.
Checking reference further promotes ableism by casually ignoring the reasons why a candidate couldn’t have performed better in their previous organization. Such a reference check discards the efforts put by a candidate in their past in the previous organization just because the person giving the reference is either not aware of it or doesn’t consider their efforts for their own reason.
Checking references can often be seen as the organization’s lack of faith in the candidate which is bound to promote a reluctant behaviour from the candidate towards the organization in the future. Once the employer breaches the confidentiality of their candidate, the person might have a difficult time coming up with ideas, suggestions or even complaints even after being selected.
These pros and cons when it comes to checking references will always be a topic involving contention and because of security reasons can’t be simply avoided, however, what should be focused on is determining the aspect of safety through references instead of efficiency a candidate would bring to the organization. So ask yourself if you are ready to gamble by being more cautious than required or are you going to play it smart?
#referencebianessshadow #employeereferencecheck #backgroundcheck
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An avid reader, researcher and versatile content writer who is still learning and enjoys the company of animals and books on a peaceful Sunday evening.
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