[s__s]

Sure. From the employers perspective, I get the appeal of references.

As a candidate I find them to be a huge overstep and will almost never provide them.

No, I’m sorry. I’m not going to pester my friends and colleagues to “hop on a quick call” or fill out a 2 page survey every time I interview somewhere.

Quite frankly, I really don’t need or want my friends to be intimately involved in my job search.

This poor guy had to have all his references book a call, only for them to all be notified shortly after that they weren’t needed any more, because he flunked the interview.

[someotherperson]

> Sure. From the employers perspective, I get the appeal of references.

Respectfully, it doesn't seem like you do. References in many cases are actually needed for compliance purposes. An example for Anthropic is if the employee might be exposed to medical data, then reference checks can be used as part of a larger validation of employee identity to satisfy HIPAA requirements.

Amazon and others have the importance of reference checks baked into their agreements for those who work with them.

[s__s]

> References in many cases are actually needed for compliance purposes.

Those aren’t the kind of checks we’re talking about. In any case, those can be performed once an offer is made.

[someotherperson]

It's the exact same checks. I know this because I've had to fill out some of these compliance documents and implement similar sorts of procedures with the legal dept. In addition to background checks, candidate reference calls prior to onboarding are becoming a checkbox that must be ticked by various external groups.

And to clarify, it's not something I support or that I find it makes a lot of sense to me -- it's just an unfortunate situation of where things are currently at.

[s__s]

You run legal compliance on everyone interviewing for a job? What a waste of everyone’s time. Very inefficient and expensive. Do it after an offer is extended.

[snailmailstare]

Don't you mean background checks? A company sees the value in talking to 4 people of the candidates choice for HIPAA is just sad.

[blitzar]

I don't usually give, as references, people who think I am a useless waste of space.

> I get the appeal of references.

Referals and word of mouth are 1000x more valuable than the references candidates put on their CV.

[nunez]

So references are popular again? Interesting.