Who am I supposed to use as a work reference?
Who am I supposed to use as a work reference?
I've applied for jobs a few times and this has always been a problem. Now that I've been out of college for a while it's even more of a problem. I don't have anyone from college that would even remember me. I can't use my current coworkers because I don't want my current employer to know I'm leaving until I have a new job lined up. I don't keep in touch with old coworkers. I don't do anything outside of work as far as volunteering or anything. I know I'm not supposed to use friends or family. Who is even left after that? The only people I have the contact info for are friends, family, and my current boss.
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What kind of employer asks for references these days? Such an inadequate and dated concept.
Tell us that you haven't looked for work recently without blah blah...
I work for a fairly big university and we still ask (or at least we did pre-COVID, when I handled some recruitment stuff). And it has to be, like... two references from two different positions (or classes or whatever)? Again, unless something changed.
References are hard as shit to get ahold of, too. I could pay off all my debts if I had a nickel for every time I had to get recruitment to nab us more refs.
Schools seem to have weird requirements. I work in broadcast engineering and applied for a bunch of jobs lately and the only one that required references was one at a community college. And not only that but they also required I give them two phone numbers on the application. Who has more than one phone number these days unless your work happens to provide you with a phone?
?????
Did they not accept email references or something? What a weird way of doing it.
Here In Australia many still do.
We have a very social culture, so many people still believe the best way to guage someone's personality and work ethic is to talk to those who are familiar but not too close.
Of course the bigger the company the less likely they are to actually call those references - many just like seeing them on the page, sort of a "does he have non-famillial references? Yes, that's a checkbox ticked ☑"
Not to mention worthless. Most references can't say shit.
And when they are, they might not be believable. My husband was once called as a previous supervisor and he was like “oh yeah that guy, we haven’t spoken in years but he saved my life once so I got nothing but good things to say about him” and like… no way the recruiter doesn’t think that’s a plant.
It's a local hvac business. It could just be that they haven't updated the application in a long time. I'm betting getting someone to update the application on their website is near the bottom of their priority list. Maybe I should just go in and physically drop off a resume.