The Bad…
Feel Like Your The Only One With Bad References? If you have bad references from quitting your job or getting yourself fired, don’t worry, you are not alone. 20 million employees have either been fired, or quit a job under bad terms in the last 10 years according to a 2008 report from the U.S dept. of Labor.
Two years ago, being fired or quitting your job was no problem with the nation enjoying almost full employment. But today, some states have a unemployment rate of 15% with very few new jobs being offered. This results in extreme competition between many job applicants fighting for few and far between jobs.
For many with bad references, you have two choices. First, you can list your bad references and when nobody responds to the 100s of resumes you sent out, or spend half a interview explaining a bad reference and then get the obligatory “we’ll call you” at the end of the interview.
The Ugly….
Many companies today have adopted human resource policies that explicitly states to new hires that they will not give them any kind of reference when they leave. Many employers will now only give dates of employment, nothing else. This limiting of reference information can be devastating to hard working, high achieving , former employees who are now at a huge disadvantage against other job applicants competing for the same job.
Many employees who do not get a job often times draw the conclusion that a negative reference was given by the former employer. This is most often not the case as the main reason one does not get a job is that the competition is so much greater. A couple of years ago, the odds of you getting hired may have been 10-1. Today, the odds could be greater than 100-1.
One large employer who had 12-15 lawsuits a year by former employees over references decided to stop giving references completely and simply ignored all requests. This ended up in another lawsuit against the company.
The typical rule of thumb for many of today’s employers is only to give “name, rank and serial number.” By limiting the information given to dates of hire, salary and position.
So imagine if there is job opening you are applying for, and it’s down to you and two other applicants. The other two applicants get positive responses from their former employer, while your employer refuses to reveal anything except you name,rank and serial number?
Think you still got the job?
The Good…
The good news is having great job references will definitely provide you with a huge advantage over your competition. And today it is easier than ever to promote your references with Linkedin and facebook social media. CareerExcuse.com is now working with some of our clients in establishing our job reference providing companies and reference providers on these social networks. This will make your future employers ability to review your positive references and be able to communicate with us that much easier. This again, will provide you with a huge advantage over other job applicants and land you that job much quicker.
Building a profile on Linked in and other social networks take a huge investment in time and resources. The good news is that we at CareerExcuse think this time well spent.
If anyone is interested in setting up their resume and with our job reference on Linkedin, please contact us at support@careerexcuse.com
This entry was posted
on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 6:05 am and is filed under Job References.
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Super post, Need to mark it on Digg
Thanks
Elcoj