Tips for Collecting Job References

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Tine Buechler from Business Growth Training and I am here today on behalf of Expert Village.com. In this clip we are going to talk about references. Now I know that some companies don’t check references and there are certainly a good reason for that but many companies do check references and check them very closely. Specifically because statistically depending what articles you read, between 20 and 80 percent of resumes have false information on them. People will say that they have completed degrees when they haven’t. They’ve got certain education and skills but perhaps they don’t and they put this information on their resume. Employers that are seeking to find the truth and validate what is written on your resume and what information you gave in the interview. So they are going to use references for this tool to do this. That means for you when you choose your references, you need to choose references that can validate your resume. You need to choose references that can validate the information that you provided in the interview. It is very important that you think thoroughly through the references that you are going to use. You should have a list between probably 3 to 5 business references and probably 2 to 3 what I would call character references; people who have known you for a long time and I know that sounds like a lot of references. The reason why you want to do that is some employers only want character references. They don’t want business references. Other employers only want work or business references. They don’t want character references. If you are prepared ahead of time and if you have talked to each of your references and you’ve given your references a copy of your resume, then you are prepared. If an employer says I’d like your references, could I check your references. I like them like 3 business references or I would like 3 character references, you are prepared, you’re organized, your references are prepared and organized and in terms of marketing, it could only be doing a much better job. So what we are going to do is look at first of all creating references that you can use. If you have letters of reference they work very well as well. Some people want to talk to people so you do need to have people references that can be spoken to. That is a very important part of it as well. When you are creating your references again that you need to think of your employment goal and you need to think of marketing. You need to think of people who can talk positively, people who can speak clearly, and people who will speak clearly about your skills and who can answer questions as well. All of these are important characters of a reference. "