Knowing What You Cannot Know: Blind Referencing

Earlier this week, Ray Zinn wrote an informative piece in Entrepreneur magazine titled "The Key to Hiring the Best Employees." We were very interested in his thoughts on blind referencing.

Ray offers his depth of hiring experience to help hiring managers of all sorts zero in on some of the best practices for hiring the best people. While there are a number of gems in this article—go check it out!—one section stood out to us more than others. In a section titled "Knowing what you cannot know," Ray acknowledges that there are some things you cannot know in an interview.

It makes sense: for those few moments of critical contact, the candidate is in control.

Resumes offer a similar, somewhat limited analysis about a person's background. A quick search for "resume consultant" on Google nets nearly 130 million results, meaning that resumes are increasingly being constructed to fit a hiring manager's expectations, to "check all the boxes," rather than reflect a person's character and experience.

The article mentions a couple of different options to "know what you cannot know," including finding unlisted references in a person's network. Blind, or unlisted referencing, while frequently practiced, can open your business up to claims of discrimination and violating equal opportunity law. Also, the reliability of that information is inconsistent.

We see social media analysis (mentioned in the article) as a much more reliable information source. Each publicly available post involves a conscious action (post, like, comment, etc.) rather than someone else's potentially misinformed opinion about that person.

What are your thoughts on blind referencing? Drop us a line and let us know!