[Psychlist]

What you do sounds like a reasonable interpretation of top grading. It's also what I'm used to, largely.

Where it gets tricky is with people like who are older and have "done interesting things". I did short contracts for more then a decade and interspersed them with cycle touring. So my full work history is a thing of joy and beauty, but asking me to go through it and re-locate one person from each company, contact them, and get a reference... you've just asked me to do 100 hours work at the very least. Even leaving out the non-technical jobs only halves the number. When a major bank wanted a list of every place I've lived for the last ten years they eventually decided that "no fixed address" was acceptable.

But I expect that if I applied to you and said "here's the last ten" you would be happy with that. And FWIW I have a number of quite enthusiastic referees available on request.

[bitexploder]

We just want two references and a warm introduction to them. We pick what we think is the most relevant recent experience and negotiate from there, being sensitive to availability etc. Doing it for every job and asking the candidate to do it is kind of lazy in our opinion. It’s just a logistical chore to set up a meeting. All we need is the intro for context :)