If you are a founder looking to build out your leadership team making reference calls for potential hires before making the offer is absolutely critical. The risk with hiring people without making reference calls is that you only know one version of this person — the version he has shared with you during interviews. And interviews by design are controlled environments. Both you and the candidate are at your best behavior — you are both selling. But what happens when the selling stops? This is where reference calls come in. If done right, ref calls can save a lot of time and bandwidth later — you can avoid the risk of someone leaving your org due to a lack of culture fit, you might be able to develop a sense of someone’s working style and ensure that they enjoy working with you. In fact for leadership hires, reference calls may be the only way to gauge certain skills/qualities that you may be looking for — can this person inspire her team, is she good at building and managing large teams, can she attract talent, and so on.
In this post, I’ll cover some tips on making reference calls. Let’s jump right in..
Know what you don’t know:
In interviews, it is easy to assess tangibles but the intangibles are harder to assess. For instance, you can tell if someone has good technical skills, but you might not be able to assess if she is great with people and you won’t know how she handles conflict with her managers. And so on..
Debrief with your interview panel and listen for instances where you find your team on the fence. For example, ‘he answered my questions well, but didn’t seem to be taking hints/direction’ Or ‘he got argumentative but got to the right answer’. These instances could be symptoms of an underlying issue. Maybe the person is defensive, maybe he is less of a team player and prefers doing everything himself. Or maybe there is nothing there. But you would be better off being sure before making the offer.
Make a list of everything you don’t know and everything you’d like to validate. Use it as a guide for reference calls.
Cover a range of perspectives:
People often just talk to the ex-manager and a direct reportee and are done with it. But think about it, if you are hiring a Head of Sales or a Head of BD, doesn’t it make sense to get feedback from an ex-customer/partner? If you are hiring a VP Engg, doesn’t it make sense to get feedback from VP Product to understand how she worked with other stakeholders? Think hard about who should be in the reference pool and then overlay what you would like to double-click on with each person.
For instance, when hiring a VP Engg and referencing with the product team, you want to understand whether the VP Engg gave realistic timelines, was she a thought partner or just an execution gal, was she engineering first or did she also understand business and hustle on important features that had a business impact?
Reference calls should be comprehensive. This is not just a check-the-box item. I’ve found that if you do about 5 reference calls (30 mins each), you end up getting a pretty good picture of a person’s personality to assess whether you feel excited about having them on-board. But 5 is just my number. Anything less than 3 is unlikely to be sufficient unless you have found serious red-flags in the first one or two calls.
Getting to the right people:
Finding the right people to talk to is actually not very difficult. Just ask the candidate to give names of people she has worked closely with. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it allows the candidate to put her best foot forward — you aren’t accidentally talking to her nemesis or to people she never got along with. There is the issue that the candidate has probably not yet resigned from her previous company. But in this scenario especially, you don’t want to be doing back door ref calls. Talk to the candidate’s confidants.
Conducting the call:
> People interpret responses differently and it helps to get diverse perspectives. So it’s generally a good practice to have at least two people/senior leaders on the team join the ref call including the hiring manager. Have one person lead the call and another person jump in when there is a question to avoid ‘chaos’
> Go in knowing what to look for, but don’t go prepared with questions. Going with a list of questions easily turns the conversation into an interview and deprives you of the benefits of a free-flowing conversation
> Most people want to ensure that they don’t jeopardize the candidate’s chances of getting hired. So use the first 2–5 mins letting them know that you have really liked the candidate so far and that the objective of the call is just to get to know the person better. Also, introduce yourself 🙂
> Kick off the call with having the person describe his working relationship with the candidate. This way you know how to weigh the feedback. Someone with a 1-month overlap with the candidate won’t know the persona as well as someone who knows her for a year. If the overlap, however, was small — say 1 or 2 months over a certain project, ask the person to briefly describe this project so you understand the contours and arent asking out of context questions
> Always ask open-ended questions. Best reference calls are when you talk less and the person giving the ref speaks more. Stay attentive and know where to tease and when to jump in with a question
> Ref calls are a lot about listening to what is not being said. People generally have good intentions and are nervous during ref calls wanting to ensure that they don’t say anything negative. At the same time, people don’t want to lie either. Watch out for what the ref is not saying. Pay close attention and dig in if you feel a response is ambiguous.
An example:
Ref: XYZ is great. She is extremely smart. A few people didn’t get along with her. But that happens to everyone.
(Ref feels uncomfortable about an area, but is minimizing it with an ambiguous statement — ‘it happens to everyone’. Reality is, yes it happens to everyone, but it is rarely top of mind for people when describing somebody unless not being liked by others happens often with a person. Pay close attention and watch for these cues)
You: Yes of course. Can you describe what type of people wouldn’t get along with her?
Ref: XYZ is extremely opinionated. Not everyone is open to taking opinions from others
(Ref is again not divulging too much.. ‘Not everyone is open’ is a generic statement. Ask a ‘why’ question)
You: Hmmm… And why in your opinion this happens with XYZ? Is it because of how XYZ expresses herself or could it be something else?
Ref: XYZ is a great person! But she is also very confident and often such people can rub others the wrong way. They aren’t the most diplomatic. They won’t necessarily think about who they are talking to or why the other person is saying what he is saying. They are also not tolerant of people who are not as smart as they are…
Now you know that there may be an issue. That the candidate is not tolerant of people who are not as smart. Q is, is this a problem for you? It is a problem if this is a leadership role because it could lead to attrition. It isn’t an issue if this person is a talent magnet, can hire exceptionally smart people quickly. It may also not be an issue if this person responds to feedback really well. So your next question could be about that… Depending on your company’s culture this could be a serious issue right here and you may choose not to dig deeper on this topic and move on to another topic. Net- net, ref calls are about very active listening and very active engagement
> You know it’s been a bad ref call if it didn’t bring you any closer to knowing the candidate better. You should begin to get a sense of this person. You should be able to describe her personality better after every call.
> After every ref call, debrief and assess if there is a pattern emerging. Assess if you would like to understand something better and/or change your area of focus for the next ref call
Reference calls can feel like an overhead especially when a candidate has cleared all interview rounds. But at an early stage, company culture is so fragile and stakes are so high, that skipping this step can be detrimental to a successful outcome for you.
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