Should You Include a Reference Letter in Your Job Application?
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Here's your Money Briefing for Thursday, May 6th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. When applying for a job, there are a lot of details to get in order. Updating your resume, writing a cover letter, but what about a list of references? A letter or two from past employers used to be standard, but fewer people these days think it's necessary.
you get a sense that no one's going to give a bad reference. Like if you got fired from a job, you probably wouldn't give that boss as a reference. So there's a perception that there's less of a value add.
Krithika Varager writes the at work column for the Wall Street Journal. She's been looking into the decline of references and talking to people who come down on both sides of the argument. We'll talk to her about it after the break.
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How has the role of reference letters in hiring changed recently?
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When applying for a job, how important is a letter of recommendation? Not as much as it used to be, according to a lot of hiring managers. So why this change in attitude and what kind of vetting is being done in its place? Krithika Varagar wrote about this in her At Work column for the WSJ, and she's here to talk about it. Krithika, thanks for taking the time to chat.
Thank you so much for having me.
So about 60% of companies surveyed last year by the background check company HireRight said they've performed checks on prospective hires, and that's down 10% from three years earlier. So why are fewer hiring managers placing importance on checking applicants' references?
first of all, there's a sense that they can be a little bit redundant because references are usually still people that applicants provide themselves. So you get a sense that no one's going to give a bad reference. Like if you got fired from a job, you probably wouldn't give that boss as a reference. So there's a perception that there's less of a value add. And there's a lot of other kinds of social proofing now too, like social media and the internet. So in terms of corroborating things from your resume, There are other ways to do that than calling up your supervisors. So for both of those reasons, the centrality of the personal job reference has been displaced a little bit.
You know, one argument in favor of references is that they can help a hiring manager get a fuller picture of a candidate. If that's now being done in other ways, what should job applicants watch out for?
So it's pretty standard practice now to look at an applicant's social media profiles. So anyone on the job market at this point, it's common wisdom to clean up your social media, even if it's not part of the application. Anything on the Internet that is associated with your name is fair game for an employer to look up. And there are also a variety of automated background checking softwares now so they can kind of take the phone call and so on out of the equation. So basically, with the rise of the internet, there are a lot of other ways to check out whether an applicant's resume is legit or not.
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