been applying to a lot of jobs, in my career field and otherwise, and a lot of them are asking if they can contact my previous supervisors. they cannot, because i do not have any way to contact them myself LOL but is this really normal?? who is actually calling those people? is this affecting hiring decisions??
It’s the norm in parts of the Swedish public healthcare sector - where contact information itself is public. In the private sector less so, usually the applicant supplies their own references which we’ll then happily ignore and try to find colleagues and even previous managers to contact ourselves to get the true picture.
“Here is a list of my references, most of them are my close colleagues and they know what I’m like at work”
“Yeah no lol we’ll just scroll through your LinkedIn contacts and read your Facebook posts instead”
Classic
I’ve been a hiring manager and have had plenty of people handing in phony references.
(It’s illegal in the EU for an employer to go trawling a candidate’s social media btw)
Right, I’m very curious about how you’d find relevant colleagues (not in the reference list) without using e.g. LinkedIn?
Also curious about the phoniest reference you’ve ever received, if you care to share.
I’m 51. I have former uni friends and colleagues working everywhere in this region. If an applicant claims to have worked at X during Y it’s not that difficult to ask someone who was at that company at the same time and go from there.
The phoniest reference was at our US office where I got fooled (since I didn’t have a network there to go and ask) when I hired someone for a devops position who turned out to know absolutely nothing about devops. That “former colleague” reference I spoke to was lying their ass off. After a while we managed to figure out that it was the person’s partner who did all the work from home, whilst themselves also working another job.