Wednesday, May 30, 2007
How to Detect Bad References?
I have been wanting to know the facts about my previous employer and want to know firsthand if they are indeed giving me a good reference or a negative feedback reference.
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I left on good terms and thought of calling them myself disguised as a recruiter and asking the questions a recruiter would normally ask the HR department. But I do not know what to ask.
Any advice would be very helpful.
Thank you,
Gary 
First off, let's not misrepresent ourselves. Journalistic codes of ethics tell us not to do that, and our personal ethics would preclude us from pretending we're someone we're not.
Let me ask, if you left on good terms, why do you think someone would be giving you negative references? If you have no reason to think that, I would forget about it.
Many, many companies have policies against giving any references at all. The policy may allow people to go no further than to confirm employment dates. This of course, is to prevent people from giving potentially damaging references. Even where there are no policies, it is likely that editors are far more likely to give detailed references when they are positive than when they are not.
But if you have a good reason to believe someone is giving a bad reference -- and failure to get a job is not, in my view, strong enough evidence -- there are services that will make a reference check on you and for you. This, of course, is misrepresentation, too.
The grounds for bringing a lawsuit over negative references are similar to the grounds for a libel suit. Remember that truth is a defense in either case. If someone says something bad about you -- and can back it up in court with documentation -- your case would be hurt and you could be embarrassed.
Unless you left on awful terms, someone threatened to badmouth you or you have heard that someone is giving bad references about you, I would worry about something else.
Coming Thursday: This journalist would like to go to law school to become a law adviser to a media company. She wonders about going to law school part time.
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