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Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

What is the downside to just always giving a positive review, though? To rephrase the original question - this is recruiter/company A calling a person who works at company B to see if someone is suitable for company A. If you just always give a nice review, what is the downside for you? Unless you had genuine personal issues with the candidate, why wouldn't you just always give a good review? If the person doesn't work out, what recourse does the recruiter / company A have against you?

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Ignoring that you might altruistically want to help another company -- what's the downside to being honest? If you don't want to go into detail, you could just say "We would/wouldn't hire this individual again." You gain and lose nothing either way.

I don't think the recruiter seeking a positive or negative review, so much as simply verifying claims made by the candidate or their resume. Something like...

> Tell me a little about Jim's day-to-day

> Sure... Jim is an above average junior software dev...

> Sorry you say junior or senior dev? Does Jim have team management roles?

You can give a glowing review, but depending how how Jim portrayed himself, the review can be taken by the recruiter as a net neg/pos. To directly address your question - I don't think there's much down-side for a reference to always provide a positives reviews. Just keep in mind that an experience recruiter will probably realize this too (they've probably been burned before), and have some clever ways to ferret out the key info they're after.

These questions, to me, sound like leaking confidential information about my current employer. I'd personally refer questions like that to HR.

If you were this person's boss, you'd refer these simple questions to HR?

Recruiter and former CTO here. References are a box-ticking exercise that you pay someone like Experian to do, so that you can say it was done as part of a security review.

That sounds like "employment verification": did $CANDIDATE actually work at $YOUR_COMPANY, with $JOB_TITLE, between $START_DATE and $END_DATE?

I think the "references" under discussion here are actually phoning up former colleagues/managers for more detailed questions.

They are the same references. Most companies with a decent HR department will only give the employee verification answers anyway.

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