Reference wastage

A former work acquaintance, Brad, is in the job-hunting mode again for what seems like the eighth time in as many years.  He is what I would call a B+ player: someone who does good work within certain parameters.  I offered to give him a good reference based on some work at a mutual, former employer.  Today was the third one I’ve done this month.

Generally, a reference check is a formality in that it’s expected to yield nothing but favorable results.  If it doesn’t, you’re seriously fucked.  It’s also useful for a referencee to help “close” the loop, fishing for hints to feed back to the candidate on what the employer’s thinking.  I wrote Brad the following:

John Bigbootie of Yoyodyne Propulsion called.  He started off with “What’s Brad’s weakness?”  For this, I suggested being micromanaged and managerial confusion caused immense frustration.  (Anyone who doesn’t find this frustrating is a robot.)  In this case, it helped John lighten up a bit and related some of his own misadventures.

One problem here that I understated was Brad did not tell me to expect this call.  This is bad for Brad because I can’t tailor the comments for the specific position he’s interviewing.  Luckily, I had an opportunity to ask John for this information.

He was also interested in why you had left [former mutual employer], thinking you had been terminated, incarcerated or worse.  I said you were stagnating in the current role and saw an opportunity (at [where he went]) working with similar technologies.

The interviewer is concerned about his job-hopping.   Seeing as [former mutual employer] is the last, stable position, John’s wondering WTF is up.

The rest of his questioning was “Rate Brad on a scale from 1 to 10 on blah” where blah included:  Technical ability, meeting deadlines, personal hygiene, enthusiasm, commitment, attendance, ability to rhyme, written, willingness to do travel, getting along, purity of thought, leading, team building, initiative, time travel, time management, customer interaction, punctuation, improving processes, creativity, powers of levitation, and so on.  Where I could, I tried relating these to things you did at [previous mutual employer] at [customer he worked with].

The ones in bold are for humor value.  I hate the rating questions because it’s a bullshit scale where “5″ = terrible, not “average” as it would mathematically fall.  Furthermore, I know several people who I’d genuinely consider to be superstars — 9s or 10s — in particular areas.   So, prefaced my responses with the disclaimer of secret knowledge and answered in the upper range.  For some of these, my answer was “I did not have any visibility into that attribute.”

The last part was a warning that Brad ought to rethink his references as the perception being brought forth is he’s a slacker:

I don’t know if a tempered enthusiasm came out during your interview, but he asked about it a few times.  I tried parlaying this as your being technically solid, and interested in being hands-on versus not externally effusive as a sales person would be expected.  I need an additional example to hype up.  One of the comments/concerns he related from someone else expressed concerns that you were perceived as a “9 to 5 person.”

Brad’s response wasn’t so cool:

Thanks for helping out.  I don’t really care if they don’t make me an offer.  I’m not that on fire for them anyway.  They’re really a bunch of geeks. Not software geeks in flip-flips and shorts, but industry type geeks engineer glasses and pocket protectors. I hope I get an offer from them, but I’m pretty sure I’ll turn it down.

At this point, I’m about to write “Brad, if you’re not seriously interested in a position, don’t fucking waste my time.”