What a Reference Can and Cannot Say

Decide the organisation's reference policy once, write it down, and apply it to everybody — because the risk in references comes almost entirely from inconsistency. A warm reference for one person and a bare confirmation of dates for another, with no stated rule behind the difference, is the pattern that creates a problem.

The workflow in “What a Reference Can and Cannot Say” becomes more reliable when work records, approvals and later corrections can be distinguished. For teams exploring monitask pricing, how teams evaluate monitask pricing can provide practical context, while policy ownership, employee explanation and final decisions remain with accountable people.

References are usually given by whoever receives the request, from memory, under time pressure, with no idea what the organisation's position is. That is how an unguarded sentence ends up in writing.

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The two usual policies

The factual reference gives dates of employment, job title and sometimes reason for leaving, and nothing else. It is safe, widely used and slightly unhelpful to everybody.

The fuller reference adds performance, attendance, suitability and an answer to the question of whether the organisation would re-employ. It is more useful and requires more care.

Either is defensible. What is not is having no policy, which means the answer depends on who opens the email.

Accurate, fair and not misleading

Wherever the obligation comes from, the shape is similar in most systems: a reference should be accurate, should be fair overall, and should not create a false impression by what it leaves out.

That last point catches a common manoeuvre. Omitting a live disciplinary matter to avoid saying anything negative can be more problematic than mentioning it, because the omission misleads. Equally, mentioning an allegation that was never upheld is its own problem. Where something sits in this territory, it is a question for somebody qualified in the place concerned rather than one for the person who happened to receive the request.

Things that should not appear

• Anything that was alleged and not upheld, or not concluded.
• Sickness absence or health information, which carries its own restrictions.
• Opinions about the person's character rather than their work.
• Anything the organisation could not evidence from its own records.
• Remarks about a grievance the person raised, or a claim they brought.
• Hints — a short, flat reference sent to signal something is still a communication.

The last is the one experienced managers use and it is not as deniable as they think. A reference that is deliberately terse in order to convey a meaning is conveying that meaning.

Who is allowed to give one

Name the people who may respond and route everything to them. Then tell everybody else — explicitly, because they will not assume it — that a personal recommendation written in a personal capacity about a former colleague can still be read as the organisation speaking.

That conversation is worth having before somebody writes a glowing public recommendation for a person who was dismissed, which happens more often than anybody expects.

Verbal references

The telephone call is where the trouble is. A recruiter rings, a manager is helpful, and something is said that would never have been written.

The policy should be that references are given in writing only, and that telephone enquiries are answered by offering to send the written one. That is awkward for about four seconds and it removes the single largest source of reference problems.

Keeping a copy

Every reference given should be kept in the file, with the date and the recipient. The person may be entitled to see it, and in any case the organisation needs to know what it said.

Keeping the request as well is worth the filing. Six months later the useful question is often what was asked rather than what was answered, particularly where the request included a specific question the organisation chose not to answer.

The request that asks a specific question

Reference forms increasingly ask narrow questions: how many days of absence, whether any disciplinary action is live, whether the organisation would re-employ. Each is harder to answer than it looks, and absence questions in particular may touch information that carries its own restrictions.

Decide in advance which questions the organisation answers and which it declines, and apply that consistently. Declining to answer a question is fine when it is the policy; declining for one person and answering for another is the pattern that causes difficulty.

Telling the person what they will get

An employee leaving on reasonable terms is entitled to know what the reference will say, and telling them costs nothing. It also removes a recurring anxiety that otherwise produces correspondence.

Where the reference will be bare because that is the policy, say so, and say that it applies to everybody. A person who knows the rule is far less likely to read their own reference as a judgement, and it is a question worth settling once, at the exit, while there is still somebody to settle it with.