By the time most employers pick up the phone, the decision is already made.
You liked the candidate. You told your partner about them. You have started mentally scheduling their first week. The reference call is the last box, and you are making it to hear that you were right. So you call the two people the candidate selected, you ask whether they enjoyed working together, and you hear that they did.
That call cost you twenty minutes and told you nothing. Not because references are useless, but because almost everything about how they are usually run is designed to produce agreement. Wrong timing, a hand-picked sample, and questions that are socially difficult to answer honestly.
This is the last verification step before you commit real money to a person, and it sits inside a larger process: the complete guide to hiring your first employee covers where it fits, from defining the role through to the offer. What follows is how to make the call itself worth making.
Why the standard reference check fails
Three structural problems, and none of them is about asking nicer questions.
You call after deciding, not before. Once you have chosen someone, every ambiguous signal gets read charitably. A reference saying “he needed a bit of direction early on” lands as reassurance when you have already decided, and as a warning when you have not. Same sentence, different weight, depending entirely on when it arrives.
You call the sample the candidate assembled. Nobody lists the manager who put them on a performance plan. This is not dishonesty, it is the game as designed: you asked for references and they gave you their best ones. Any process where the subject picks the evaluators will produce good evaluations.
You ask questions that are hard to answer badly. “How was she to work with?” has one socially acceptable answer. A former manager who has reservations will not volunteer them into a question shaped like that, particularly if they are worried about liability or simply do not want to hurt someone’s chances.
Fix the timing and the sample and the questions matter less. Fix only the questions and you have a better-worded formality.
Call before you decide, not after
Make reference calls when you have two candidates you would genuinely hire and no clear winner. That is the only moment when the information can change anything, which is the only moment it is worth gathering.
This has a practical consequence worth accepting: you will sometimes make reference calls for a person you do not hire. That feels wasteful. It is the cost of the calls meaning something.
How to reach someone the candidate did not pick
Two approaches, both entirely above board.
Ask for a specific role rather than a name. Instead of “please send two references,” try: “I would like to speak with whoever managed you directly at your last role, and one person who reported to you or worked alongside you day to day.” Now you have defined the seat, not accepted a volunteer. If the direct manager is unavailable and the reason sounds thin, that is worth a follow-up question rather than a shrug.
Ask the references you do get for one more name. At the end of a good call: “Is there anyone else who worked closely with them that you would suggest I speak to?” This is how you get a second-degree reference, and second-degree references are consistently more candid because they were not chosen for their loyalty.
What not to do: call someone at the candidate’s current employer without permission. That can cost them their job, and you will have done real harm to someone who has done nothing wrong. If you need a current-employer view, say so and let the candidate manage the timing.
When their old company refuses to say anything
Increasingly common, and it stops most first-time employers cold. Many organizations now instruct staff to confirm dates and job title only. Three ways through it.
Call the person, not the company. Corporate policy binds the HR department. It does not stop a former manager from taking a call on their mobile and speaking as an individual about someone they used to work with. Most will, if you ask for their view rather than an official statement.
Ask the one question policy usually still permits. “Are they eligible for rehire?” is factual rather than evaluative, so it often survives the policy. A flat no, or a pause, tells you a great deal.
Substitute a work sample. If verification is genuinely unavailable, stop trying to buy certainty through references and buy it through evidence instead. A small paid piece of real work tells you more than three cautious phone calls, and the cost of a bad hire calculator makes the case for spending a few hundred dollars on that rather than guessing.
How to open the call
The first ninety seconds decide whether you get a careful answer or a real one, and most people waste them by sounding like a formality.
What does not work: “Hi, I’m calling for a reference on Marcus Webb, do you have a few minutes?” That frames the call as a compliance step and invites a compliance answer.
What works better is naming the stake and lowering the risk:
“Thanks for taking this. I run a five-person company and I am about to make my second hire, so this is a big decision for me rather than a formality. Marcus is one of two people I would be happy to hire, and I am trying to work out which of them will do better in a role with very little structure. I am not asking you to make the call, and nothing you say goes back to him. Mostly I want to know how to manage him well if I do hire him.”
Four things are doing work in that paragraph. The stakes are real, so the person understands why honesty matters. You have named the actual question rather than asking for a general verdict. You have promised discretion, which is the single biggest unlock for a hesitant reference. And you have signaled that you may hire the person anyway, which removes the fear that a candid remark will cost someone a job. That last point is counterintuitive and it matters: a reference who thinks their words are a veto will hedge, while one who thinks they are helping you prepare will talk.
Then stop talking. The most common first-timer error on these calls is filling the pause, and the pause is where the useful sentence arrives.
When the candidate has no work history to check
First job, career change, or several years out of the workforce. Standard reference advice assumes a former manager exists, and sometimes one does not. Do not treat this as a red flag, because it is extremely common in exactly the pool a small employer recruits from.
Substitute the seat rather than skipping the step:
- A course tutor, trainer, or apprenticeship supervisor. Anyone who set them work, saw them do it, and had to assess it. That is functionally a manager.
- A volunteer or community coordinator. Someone who relied on them showing up when nothing forced them to. For reliability, this is better evidence than a paid role they hated.
- A client, if they have freelanced. Ask what they were hired to do and whether it arrived as promised.
- A colleague from a different function, when the only available manager is unreachable. Weaker, but not worthless, provided you ask about observed work rather than opinions.
Then adjust the questions. Most of the fifteen above assume a management relationship, so lean on the ones about observed behavior: what they owned, what needed checking, how they responded to correction, whether the person would work with them again. And weight a paid work sample more heavily than usual, because for someone without a track record it is the only direct evidence you will get.
What to write down afterwards
Write notes during the call and finish them within ten minutes of hanging up, for two reasons that have nothing to do with bureaucracy.
The first is comparison. You are going to speak to references for two candidates and you will not reliably remember which one produced the vague answers. Record the actual phrases rather than your impression: “long pause before answering the rehire question” is usable next week, while “seemed positive overall” is a feeling that will drift toward whichever candidate you already liked.
The second is that hiring decisions occasionally get questioned later, and a short factual record of who you spoke to, when, and what they said about the work protects everyone. Keep it to observed job performance. Do not write down anything about protected characteristics, and if a reference volunteers something in that territory, leave it out of the notes entirely rather than recording that you disregarded it.
The 15 questions
Group one establishes the relationship, because a reference who barely worked with the candidate cannot tell you anything and you need to find that out in the first two minutes.
- What was your working relationship, and over what period?
- How often were you actually in contact day to day?
- What was the team’s situation while they were there? Growing, shrinking, under pressure?
Group two goes after performance without inviting a verdict. The trick is asking for description rather than judgment.
- What did they own that nobody else could have covered?
- Walk me through a piece of work you remember them doing well. What made it good?
- What did they need the most support with?
- Where did they need you to check the work before it went out?
- How did they handle being told something needed changing?
Group three is where most of the signal lives, because these questions have no comfortable neutral answer.
- If you were building a team again tomorrow, what role would you put them in, and what role would you keep them away from?
- Who on your team found them easiest to work with, and who found it hardest?
- What would they say was the least enjoyable part of the job? Were they right?
- If they had stayed another year, what would you have needed to change about the role?
Group four is the closing set. Number 13 is the most useful question in the whole list and the one most people are too polite to ask.
- Would you hire them again? Why, or why not?
- Is there anything I should ask them about directly that would help us start well?
- Is there anyone else who worked closely with them you would suggest I speak to?
You will not use all fifteen. Pick eight, keep the call to twenty-five minutes, and leave silence after each answer rather than moving straight to the next question.
Reading the answers
The words matter less than the shape of the response.
Enthusiasm arrives fast or not at all. A manager who rated someone highly says so in the first three seconds, unprompted, often before you finish the question. Warmth that has to be assembled is not warmth.
Listen for the pivot to attendance and attitude. When a former manager can only tell you that someone was punctual, pleasant, and reliable, and cannot produce a single example of work they did well, you have learned something specific: this person was easy to have around and not memorable to manage.
Treat hedging as a request. “I would say he was… generally solid” is often a reference trying to be honest without being quotable. The right response is not to press harder but to lower the stakes: “I am not asking you to make my decision. What would you want to know if you were in my position?” That reframing works remarkably often.
Calibrate against the reference, not against your hopes. Some people describe everyone glowingly. Ask them about someone else on the team, even briefly. If all their descriptions sound identical, their praise carries no information either way.
What you cannot ask
Reference calls are subject to the same limits as interviews. Age, health and disability, religion, national origin, marital and family status, pregnancy, and anything about protected characteristics are all off the table, and they stay off the table even when the reference volunteers the information first. If a former manager starts telling you about someone’s divorce or health, steer back: “I appreciate that, though what I really need is how the work went.”
The EEOC’s small business guidance on what you cannot ask when hiring is written for employers rather than lawyers and is worth reading once before your first call. Two further rules: do not ask about salary history where it is prohibited, and if the role involves money, keys, vehicles, or vulnerable people, run a formal background check as a separate process and tell the candidate you are doing so.
When references actually change the decision
Honestly? Not often, and that is fine. A well-run process should mostly confirm what a structured interview already surfaced. If your reference calls routinely overturn your conclusions, the problem is upstream, in the interview, and how to interview someone plus a competency-based question bank will do more for you than better reference calls.
What references reliably do is two smaller things, both worth the time.
They catch the rare serious mismatch: the person whose described role turns out to be someone else’s work, or whose departure was less voluntary than presented. Rare, and expensive to miss.
And they tell you how to manage this person well from week one. Question 14 is not due diligence, it is a head start. A former manager telling you “she goes quiet when she is overloaded rather than saying so” has just handed you something it would otherwise take you six months to learn.
If you are not yet sure the role and the process are tight enough for any of this to matter, the Am I Ready to Make My First Hire? assessment is a faster way to find out than discovering it on a reference call.
The one thing to change
If you take nothing else from this: move the call earlier, to the point where you have two real candidates and no favorite.
Everything else here is technique, and technique applied after the decision is just paperwork.