What You Get ✓ Dates of employment ✓ Job title (maybe) ✗ Real performance data ✗ Behavioral patterns ✗ Why they really left What Assessment Adds ✓ Behavioral profile ✓ Integrity indicators ✓ Motivation pattern ✓ Targeted questions ✓ Objective consistency
Reference checks tell you very little. Assessments tell you what to ask — and what the answers mean.

We all go through the motions of the reference check. We call the numbers on the resume, we ask the questions, we listen to the answers. And we get almost nothing useful in return.

Why Reference Checks Fail

The standard reference check has a fundamental design flaw: the candidate selects the references. No one hands you a list of people who will say unflattering things. By the time you’re checking references, you’re talking to people who were chosen specifically to support the hire.

Beyond that, most organizations have strict policies that limit what can be shared. The personnel clerk answering your call may have no direct knowledge of the employee’s performance. They’re reading from a file. Dates of employment, position held — if you’re lucky, a practiced non-answer about rehire eligibility.

The Deeper Problem: Confirmation Bias

Even when references are checked at the highest level — CEO-to-CEO, with genuine trust and candor — there is still a problem. By the time you pick up the phone, you have already decided you want to hire this person. The questions you ask are shaped by that desire. You hear what confirms the decision. You dismiss what doesn’t.

A client once called references for a sales manager candidate he was extremely excited about. The references — contacted through his own personal network — were glowing. The pre-employment assessment told a different story. He hired anyway. The candidate failed within the year. In retrospect, the assessment had identified exactly what went wrong.

Making the Reference Check Useful

The way to get more out of a reference check is to go in with a road map. And that road map comes from the assessment report. If the assessment identifies a concern about organizational habits, you know exactly what to probe. If it flags a potential integrity issue, you have a specific behavioral area to explore. You stop asking open-ended questions and start asking targeted ones.

The reference check and the assessment are partners. The assessment identifies the behavioral areas worth scrutinizing. The reference check — when done well — provides real-world confirmation or contradiction. Together, they give you multiple consistent data points on the same person. That’s how you build confidence in a hiring decision.