30-minute reference calls and questions about personal lives: Workers share hiring horror stories

A post on Reddit’s r/recruitinghell talked about someone being kept on the phone for over 30 minutes by a caller asking detailed questions about a colleague they had last worked with four years ago. They were expected to recall specific projects, outcomes, and KPI performance on the spot. “I wanted to be like, ‘Lady, I worked with this guy four years ago, he was pleasant to work with and knew what he was doing, but I’m sorry I don’t have examples of projects we worked on together and whether or not they met their KPIs at a moment’s notice’,” they wrote.

The shift from what reference calls used to be, essentially a vibe check to confirm the candidate was not a nightmare to work with, to what they are apparently becoming is the subject of the thread.

What Reddit said

The responses confirmed the pattern while adding dimensions the original poster had not encountered.

One commenter pointed to a process change that compounds the intrusion: “Reference calls used to only happen at the very end of the process when they were planning to move forward as a final check. Now they do it halfway through the process when they have tons of candidates still in the running. It’s ridiculous and unprofessional.”

Another described a reference call that crossed well beyond the merely demanding into the legally questionable: “I gave a reference this month for a colleague applying at a huge health system. The call asked illegal interview questions; questions about the health of the applicant, whether she had family obligations, whether she had bad credit, whether she was disabled, whether she went to church and was a moral person.”

One commenter offered a possible explanation for why reference calls have become more intensive: “Lying on resumes has gotten so out of hand; interns are basically pretending to be de facto CEOs to get a job. I don’t necessarily blame people because it’s brutal out there, but fudging the truth has crossed over into straight-up lying about what you did.”