An Alternative to Reference Calls: Focused Endorsements

This solution applies to Executive Search, Staffing Support, HR Strategies, and

Ecosystem Development projects supported by Creative Evolutions collaborators.

Is this familiar?

When hiring an employee or engaging a new vendor, you ask for three references. After you’ve spent a week trying to schedule phone calls with busy people, you wonder… were these calls just performative? Did you learn anything that was useful to your hiring decision?

You’ve tried all sorts of ways to sneakily encourage ‘honesty’ on the phone, but it feels like pushing a boulder up a hill. You are pretty sure these aren’t the right people to answer your specific questions anyway.  

That's why our Collaborators at Creative Evolutions continue to ask: What exactly are we trying to accomplish with Reference Calls?

Through a nurtured national dialogue around their low value in our ecosystem, we know that the intention behind reference calls is usually to learn a bit more about the candidate through an established person in the field. However, because this reference is hand picked by the candidate, there is a high level of inherent bias that turns reference calls in to a performative game, rather than a chance to dig deeper into the questions you still have about the candidate.

Not to mention - it can take a lot of time and energy to coordinate a time to schedule a reference call. Unless you personally know and have established trust with the reference, it’s difficult to be confident you're getting an honest view of someone.

No one solution magically accomplishes everything, but we have choices!  First, we considered what people are trying to accomplish with reference calls:

1. Avoid a big mistake. A person might have a great resume and present well, but what if they are a liar, incompetent, or cruel when they are ‘on the inside’?

2. Learn how it is to work with that person, day to day. How do they really behave when it isn’t a hiring process? How do their co-workers or colleagues perceive their actions, behaviors, and values over time?

3. Find an answer to a specific question. A person may answer questions well, and give concrete examples from their past, but sometimes you just aren’t feeling satisfied or secure in a particular area.

With the opaque restrictions by HR policies and legal advice, and an existing environment of fear and distrust, it can be extremely difficult to address goal #1 (You want to avoid a mistake) unless you already have preexisting knowledge of or relationships with those workplaces the person has been before.

For the other two goals, however, we have developed an Actionable Alternative for references called ‘Focused Endorsements'.

1. Make a list of what you really want to know about the candidate.

2. Reframe list as highly specific questions.

3. Ask candidate to find 3 people who can address these questions.

   
   

This encourages the candidate to reach out to people who can answer something really specific that you are still curious about, rather than focusing on high-profile kinds of people who are willing to say ‘This person is great!’

You can choose for these responses to be sent either directly to you, or the candidate can collect responses and return them with the name of their endorser. This cuts out any scheduling that must be done to call a reference directly, and is more respectful of your time, the candidate’s time, and the person giving the endorsement. We’ve found this to be easier on candidates and their networks, while also allowing you to get more specific information about the candidate to make your decision.

Note that these endorsements are not ‘Letters of Recommendation’ either. Letters of Recommendation also tend to be general and onerous because the person writing them has to write a whole letter and draft it formally, instead of sharing a highly specific (i.e. valuable) but less formal (i.e. less effort) email or note.

Every candidate is different - so ask questions accordingly!

When you’re at this point in the hiring process, each candidate is going to have different areas of strength and areas where you still aren’t confident about their abilities. 

For example, you may have one candidate that you can tell has a super strong background in managing existing resources, but you aren’t as certain about their ability to adapt to new circumstances or establish a healthy working environment for their team. You might ask them to get focused endorsements from past colleagues answering the following: 

• Please share your perspective on a time they took on a new role or were given a new responsibility and how they navigated that with their team or the people around them.

• Please describe how you have seen them solve a challenging situation that didn't have a clear situation.

• Please describe what kind of culture of dynamic you have seen them establish with people who reported to them.

Perhaps you have a candidate who will need to immediately navigate some difficult circumstances, and you know that they don’t have deep knowledge of some of the elements that will need immediate attention. You might have their network respond to some of these:

• Please describe a situation where they needed to navigate something complex with limited staff/money/time and how they approached using those resources effectively.

• Please describe how you’ve seen them adapt their own role, responsibilities, or approach to fit well with a colleague or a team.

• Please share how you’ve seen them approach a situation when they didn’t have deep knowledge that they needed for a project and how they went about learning what they needed to be successful.

In early stages of a process, it is valuable to ask consistent questions of all your candidates, for comparison and to safeguard against your own biases. As you near the end of a process, however, the more specific you can be to the person in front of you, the more you will learn and the better decisions you can make!

Creative Evolutions' Executive Search & Staffing Support

When starting any kind of process, in search, strategy, culture, or ecosystem building, we begin with the belief that We have more choices than we think we do. When something (like reference calls) in a process consistently provides little value, we know we can find an alternative option that can serve our ecosystem in a better way! 

Focused endorsements are just one way that Creative Evolutions has adapted our search strategy to help organizations feel more confident in their hiring decisions. 

Other powerful adjustments have included compensating candidates, engaging outside specialists in the evaluation process who become mentors in the first year, and rethinking onboarding, transition plans, and employment agreements to reflect actual realities of new staff.

For information on how our team can work with you, or for more about other adaptations Creative Evolutions has made to the hiring and staffing work, contact us directly here!