Better Questions to Ask Candidate References

 

These days you may be experiencing difficulty finding the right people for the jobs you need to fill. And you might have already hired workers who are not performing as well as would like. Wouldn't it be useful to have a way to get key information from references that would tell you when a candidate would be good performer in a team setting and a work setting?

You probably already have a set of questions that you ask references for internal or external candidates, but are you asking questions related to characteristics on which references can shed better light?

It matters. Ratings provided by observers (in this case references) on many characteristics are more accurate than self-ratings, so you want to spend quality time with as many observers of a candidate as possible to get ratings on these characteristics in particular.

Now for the characteristics to ask about. Researchers have discovered that Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability are better assessed by observers. You would appreciate these characteristics in any project position wouldn't you? Can you think of times when individual workers did not have one or both of these characteristics?

Finally, here's how to incorporate these findings into your selection process:

1.  Create structured checklists of questions around Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability.

• Base the questions on a job analysis, which also help keep you out of legal trouble.
• Ask yourself or experts, "Where in this job does a worker show conscientiousness?" and "Where in this job does emotional stability become important?"

2.  Ask each candidate reference the same list of questions.

• Try not to ask unstructured, open-ended questions in this evaluation segment. Save that for the candidate interview.

Your friendly neighborhood HR specialists will be able to help complete this checklist and make sure it is valid, but you or your designees should be involved to ensure you get the desired results: a high performer in your project making your life a lot easier.