Krithika Varagur

speaker

141 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2021 last heard Sep 2021

Krithika Varagur’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Should You Include a Reference Letter in Your Job Application? · 6 May 2021 podcast

So I think we're starting to see folks take a little bit of a step back from that kind of deep stock.

But I think I mean, for job applicants, it's better to be on the safe side.

But it was just an interesting kind of trend I noticed when I was talking to people for this.

Yeah, it sure can.

I mean, it depends on how you use a reference.

If it's a really perfunctory kind of strengths and weaknesses question, I think you can expect the call to be a little bit less informative.

But one of the startup executives I talked to said she tries to ask references to recreate personal scenarios where they worked with the candidate to talk about a problem they solved.

And the more specific you get, the more information you can get about how a person works.

might actually be like in the office.

And another way to do that, of course, is to just make your interview questions and not the references reflect company culture more directly.

If anything, it has, you know, the pandemic means a lot of hiring is still happening fully virtually.

So, you know, there's a much greater burden of proof on a candidate that you only see through a screen who you never are going to meet in person.

There's so many different

parts of their background that you might want to check out due to the virtual process.

So if anything, the pandemic has made it more necessary, especially for smaller companies to do due diligence.

One of the startup CEOs I talked to had a good perspective on this where he said, I don't see a positive reference as a good thing, but I would see a negative reference as a really important red flag.

So for him, it's more of like a useful boundary than like a useful new source of information about the candidate.

So I thought that was a good way to think about it.

Yeah, I think that a lot of companies actually have kind of, especially larger companies, have policies now where they will only confirm employment and will not give qualitative references because they are worried about the kind of litigation aspect of this.

So, you know, especially some of the reader feedback I got from people doing hiring and stuff, they were like, we would love to get better references, but we've seen this kind of backlash to giving substantive feedback because of what you're talking about, you know, linking your reputation to this person.

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