Christoph wrote a great post about the need for reference checks in a startup.
I’m surprised to hear periodically about startups that make hires without doing reference checks. Or, when people that have completely bombed our reference checks get hired.
Reference checks serve a few purposes for us:
- Verifies that this is a good candidate (that’s the baseline you look for)
- Helps us understand how to set them up for success
- Gives us early warning on things to look out for
A few tips:
- You could potentially ask for references and do background checks before their final interview – we’ve experimented with that for a few roles, and gives us some good questions to come in with.
- Andy Dunn recommends you only go with unsolicited references – provided references paint the picture the candidate wants to paint. We haven’t gone that extreme, but I won’t hesitate to ask mutual connections, or ask provided references for anyone else they think we should talk to (“Who else did X work with?”)
- Sometimes the little details end up standing out – issues we’ve had that, we realized, lined up with what’s in their reference calls.
- We’ve sometimes had to make quick turnaround decisions on candidates and wanted to forego ref checks. Never do that. If a candidate is super hot on you, they should be able to provide references right in an interview, and calling them can be done within a couple hours. Once or twice we’ve given offers “pending reference checks”
That being said, we don’t do background checks – its something we’ve thought about, and I’m sure somewhere, someone thinks we’re crazy for not doing so.
