Getting Hired

Providing Professional References

When you’re asked to provide professional references, how should you do it?  Here’s a super-brief primer–just three things:

• Never give out your references’ contact information blindly.  Be sure you’ve got something real going on before just doling out people’s home phone number or connection information.  For one, it’s not polite and doesn’t show your references any respect, and on the other hand, it’s just not cool in our day and age to glibly share others’ personal information.
• For a job (ahem), *all* your references should be professional.  We know your mom loves you, and your landlord from Nebraska loves that you always paid rent three days early… but it’s still not applicable!
  • Ideally, two out of three of them should be from bosses who you reported DIRECTLY to.  If you give me co-workers, sub-ordinates, other managers  or other random connections within a company, then I am going to seriously wonder “WHY NOT YOUR BOSS?” and “WHAT ARE YOU HIDING?”
• You should contact them first, for two reasons:
  1. You need to verify their current contact information.
     It’s not just bad, it’s really, really bad when I call your references and their line has been disconnected, or a receptionist informs me “they don’t work here”.
  2. You need to let them know I will be calling!
     The only thing worse than a “disconnected” or “they don’t work here” message when I call your references is if they can not remember who you are!

Good luck!

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Tags: References, Resume