Checkster Blog

Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to change in its state of motion.  We often see this phenomena demonstrated in human behavior when it comes to the traditional reference check process.

The staff at Checkster was pleased to see the below article, as it reinforces what we have been saying about reference checks.  If done poorly, reference checks are a waste of time. When done well, they are THE most important assessment method.

See the article from Charles Van Heerden:

“The poor cousin of the recruitment process is the obligatory reference check. Too often it is nothing more than a perfunctory procedure to conclude an exhausting number of interviews.

Most reference checks are the outcome of a telephone conversation, as most recruiters will attach little weight to any written references. Many companies have policies prohibiting managers from providing written references, in light of potential litigation. Often the risks of providing references are overstated, resulting in limited information being provided, due to concerns about negligent referral or defamation. Privacy laws govern the contacting of referees and keeping of information. Though recruiters adopt a code of professional practice, the risk of hiring managers using their informal network to get anecdotal half-truths remains problematic.

A reference check is not a fishing expedition or idle gossip, but a structured and important part of the hiring process. Research has indicated that reference checks have about half the validity of structured interviews.

The declining value of reference checking is because it is badly done, rather than being of little value. The big challenge for recruiters is to develop a new and better way of conducting reference checks with a higher validity so that they can be more useful.

A Strategic Approach to Reference Checking
There are three very deliberate and strategic actions that recruiters can adopt to achieve significantly better results from reference checking. Having successfully implemented this approach in a number of companies, have also resulted in better retention of top talent.

(a) 360 Reference Checking
Extrapolating the benefits from 360 feedback systems, recruiters need to adopt a wider and more comprehensive approach by including:
Executives (one over one); Direct Manager; Peers; Direct reports; Clients and customers.
It is not sufficient to conduct only a minimum of two reference checks, which seems to be the general practice in many companies.”

continue reading here.

“Checkster merits your attention. Crowdsourced reference checking will be the way that things get done four or five years from now. Easier, faster better, cheaper, smarter.”

“Four years into the process, Yves Lermusi is a smooth spokesman for his gift to reference checking, Checkster. After graduating from Taleo (where he was on the ground floor and built much of their research business), Lermusi starting fermenting the idea that was to become Checkster. After 18 months in product development and 30 months of trench level selling , it looks like Yves just might have changed the way that things get done.”

Read the full review here.

You may have seen a recently published list of the most productive companies.  If your CEO is pressuring you for not being on it, Checkster offers a way for you to respond.
Productivity is the benchmark of well run companies.  In theory, the better you are at it, the better your margin should be.  That is why we invest in innovative technologies and new processes, which make the business faster, cheaper and often better.  The typical examples are the evolution in written communication, from the letter to the fax to the email.  Each step made organizations more productive.  But as technologies become widely used, the competition shifts to the people side.  As Lance Armstrong put it, it is not about the bike anymore, it is more about the people, the team or what is sometimes referred to as talent or human capital.  That is why at Checkster, we focus on getting the right people on the bike, leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to assess and produce what we call a reference check 2.0 process.  We consider HR to be the magic bullet at many companies, and it should be the killer app of any organization, pre and post hire. The core question is then, how do you know you are doing the best in hiring and people management?
How do you know if your organization is one of the best in its field?  How do you know you are the most productive?  This is where the study of the most productive companies comes in handy.  Their way of looking at it: Revenue per FTE (full time equivalent).  Although its simplicity may look attractive, it is also its shortcoming.
Today, many organizations have a significant portion of employees that are “off the books.”  They are typically referred to as contingent workers.  These are not accounted for as FTE.  This can create artificial winners and make best performers look like laggards.  We did such analysis in the past, and when you compare not only FTE, but total cost of labor (FTE+ contingent workers), you have a different story.
For instance, we looked at 2 healthcare providers (see box).  Once you compare the revenue per employee, organization #2 proves to be the best performer.  However, if you look at revenue divided by the total labor spent (total cost of labor), organization #1 appears to be the best performer and by an 11% lead.  We strongly believe that the revenue per FTE is a fake measure of productivity.  It is often used to fool unsophisticated Wall Street analysts and should certainly not be used as a basis for any decisions when comparing your performance to a competitor without looking at the contingent workers mix.  People are often your competitive edge, but making sure you are measuring the right thing is paramount, otherwise you could start to fix something that is not broken.

In short, if your CEO is asking you why you are not on the list of the most productive companies, now you know how to respond.  It is certainly more voodoo science than decision science.

I did recently a radio interview with Peter Clayton on my book Reference Check 2.0.

Listen to the full interview here.

Best sections:

“The interesting thing is that typically when we speak today about social networking strategy … 99% of the time, what it means it’s a sourcing social networking strategy.  … What we’re saying here is that social networking has more than one usage … it’s also enabling to assess the quality of those people.”

“If you use the traditional method (manual reference checking) and don’t spend the time to do it very well,  I would say stop doing it or migrate to a 2.0 version,  to the Reference Check 2.0 version. Because the way it’s done today it’s literally a waste of time.  The test really for your listeners that are head of talent acquisition departments is to ask the question: “when is the last time that you disregarded or didn’t hire someone because of a bad reference check?”

At Checkster we follow the labor trends closely, one good movie summary done by a vendor:

Have you ever asked yourself how many candidates are telling the truth during an interview?

Here is the answer from a serious study*, as 17,368 applications were analyzed across many different job categories (general management, economic and political analysis, public relations, etc.) with an innovative but strong way to detect the fake. Also, it is important to note that “candidates were warned that their responses could be verified and that any attempts to falsify information could be used as a basis for not employing them.” Thus, it was not a laboratory experiment.  The researchers divided the applicants into three groups, which we have taken the freedom to name:

In short, a third of the people you will see will pretend to have done many more things than they actually have.  The only solution: check for yourself, i.e. to connect with ex-colleagues.  This is typically called reference checking, but to check references the traditional way, you need time.  The only viable, scalable solution: Reference Check 2.0.

* Study from study from Julia Levashina, Frederick P. Morgeson, and Michael A. Campion.

Listen to the interview here: Interview

A recent article by Les Rosen, explains it well, while also endorsing Checkster’s approach.

They are several ways to look at it, the summary of this article: “Internet based references can be utilized by an employer to whittle down the field of candidates and to help an employer decide whom to hire.  Background checks occur after an employer has made a tentative decision, and needs to determine whether there is any reason NOT to hire an applicant. ”

See my latest article on ERE:

Message to Candidates: Cheating Works … Sometimes!

How many applicants fake test results and assessments?
Does cheating work? Is it worthwhile?
What can you, the employer, do about it?

keep reading…

Sometimes I would speak with people and they would say that reference checking was the best way to screen candidates, but not anymore. Fear of legal action and low compliance from participants reap poor results. Therefore, their judgment is based on reference checks performed that led to poor results, so they are convinced about their stance.
I would challenge this position and say that indeed poorly executed reference checks are a waste of time, but the Reference Check 2.0, as we call it at Checkster, is as good if not better than structured interviews. In order to prove it this, let’s look at this body of evidence.

- Harvard Business Review article on the assessment of best practices in which the authors said, “Poor practice: Conducting inadequate (or no) reference checks. Best practice: Conducting detailed reference checks.” I also recommend listening to their 14 min podcast here, where at minute 9:11 and 12:40 they explain the aforementioned point.
-Leading books on recruiting methods such as Topgrading, a well known and respected method for recruiting, is fundamentally based on two core methods: the interview process and a proper reference check. Lou Adler’s “Hire with your head” Performance based hiring said it simply: “Here’s a basic rule about reference checking: that’s not 100 percent true, but you should follow it (perform it) 100 percent of the time.”
- If you question HR practitioners and want to get more validation from business people, watch Marissa Mayer, V.P. of Search Product and User Experience at Google here in an interview and at minute 42:10 answer this question: “When you are hiring new people [at Google], is there an X factor that you are looking for?“ She replies: “ We did a regression test on what was the best predictor of performance with the interview score, the references, their background,… and we basically found that their background and references are the best predictors…”. Watch for yourself here.

- If you are in a startup watch this one.

You may find this to be all nice and good, but may simply not have the time to do it. I would challenge your view and say that you simply can’t afford not to do it. With the Reference check 2.0 you can perform a very powerful online version of the reference check by taking only 2 minutes of your time. Listen to the feedback of some of our users here. In short, reference checking went through a disillusion period for many when they had to find new ways to get to the truth. Now with the help of social networking and online automation, there is no way not to perform it anymore.

Have you ever asked yourself the following questions:
•    How good is my new hire?
•    Did I promote the right person?
•    Am I good in this new job?

If you are a manager or a recruiter, or more importantly, a member of a new team, then you want and need to know if you are good at what you do.
In business jargon, we call this the quality of hire.
Yet, the core question is: how can you know?

A report conducted by the Newman group posed this question to about 500 staffing professionals, the answers to which resulted in the chart below.

We believe that one metric is missing: the probability of re-hiring an individual. That metric is essentially a net promoting measurement tool for an individual. Think about it for a second: this simple metric (probability of re-hiring) contains it all. If someone is a great contributing team member, you will hire him/her again, if not you will not, with all grading in between. This is what we use at Checkster for our 360 and automated reference checking system. We recommend you add it as a measuring tool to assess your quality of hire, like some of our customers are doing.

See the full article Here.

We are pleased to announce a recognition we received last week at the ONREC show.

“Onrec, the only global Online Recruitment Magazine, follows worldwide innovations in the recruiting space. After extensive review of all innovative technologies across the world, we are proud to recognize Checkster as a Game Changing Recruiting Technology,” said RD Whitney, CEO of ONREC.

Full press release here.

For those of you who are unclear about what Checkster is doing, check out the interview that Hyveup did on Checkster recently:

Make reference Checking a strong and powerful tool for your organization. Avoid legal pitfalls, save time, and benchmark your organization. To do this:

Participate in a 4 minute online survey and receive the Best Practices Report for free: Click here.

Details about the survey:
The results of the research study will provide you with the best questions to ask to optimize the reference check process. This will allow you to benchmark your own internal practices.

Checkster is underwriting the cost of this study, “Best Practices in Reference Checking,” as a value-added service to our clients to encourage future product development and contribute to ongoing research in our industry regarding automated, online reference checking solutions.
Privacy is guaranteed and your contact details will not be shared with any other organizations.
All results will remain confidential.

While in India recently, I had the opportunity to meet the head of Google India, Shailesh Rao. India is in an economic boom with a GDP growth of 9 percent (compared to 3 percent with the US) in an extremely competitive talent market. It is interesting to see how Google, one of the most innovative companies today, is addressing the talent challenge. In short, what can we learn from this smart and innovative company about how they address the talent challenge in a hyper growth market?

I wrote this article for Kennedy information and you will see how recruiting decisions are made at Google. Leveraging the collective intelligence: mainly relies on two core techniques: interviewing and reference checking. We of course like the collective feedback as we provide tools that just do that, our automated reference check (reference Checkup) and 360 Checkup (simplified 360 feedback tool).

Read full article here.