Have friend check on references

A reader recently asked me how to find out if a previous employer is giving a bad reference. I answered him in my column, first advising him to troubleshoot his job search, on the likely chance that there's something else that's keeping him from getting hired. I then explained that you can check your references by having a friend call and pose as an employer.
Not all my readers approved of that answer.
After slogging through e-mails questioning my ethics, I have a slight adjustment to make to the advice. You don't need to pose as an employer, and I shouldn't have said so. You can call a reference for someone else and say "Joe Jackson has listed you as a reference for a job. I'd like to ask you a couple of questions about his work for you."
There. No mention of being an employer. Does this work? Yes, I've done it.
Is it ethical? I'd like to take a hard stance and say, "No, because it misleads the reference." But after what I've uncovered from bad references, I've come to believe that the harm done to a reference who thinks I am an employer is negligible compared with the harm suffered by a job seeker whose references speak ill of him or her.
Some readers suggested the job seeker should ask the reference directly, "What are you saying about me?" It's a good idea except that I suspect a person who would talk mean behind your back would also lie to your face.
Three categories
I don't want to give the wrong impression about references. From my experience, people who agree to speak about you to an employer fall into three categories: There are those who intend to speak well of you and do; there are those who intend to speak well of you but mess it up; and there are those who say they will speak well of you but don't intend to.
(A separate category goes to those who give only the dates and job titles of your employment. These folks don't harm you; they just confirm the facts that you've already stated.)
The first group poses no problem and represents the majority of people who serve as references. But the people in the second and third groups pose problems, whether intentionally or innocently.
Here's a real situation from my experience of checking references for my clients. The job seeker, a former city official, was coming up second for too many top-level positions. He began to suspect his references weren't coming through, and he specifically worried about a manager he had struggled with in his last post. He didn't feel he could take the manager off the list, but he thought that if he knew what the individual was saying, he could mitigate the damage.
Imagine my surprise, when calling his references, to find that there was no problem at all with the manager's discussion of my client's abilities. His assessment was peppered with skills that the client needed to strengthen, but nothing that wouldn't already be known to a potential employer.
Here was surprise
The problem reference was coming from the last place either of us expected: From his mentor. This gentleman, in an effort to show his pupil's persistence, was saying things like "pushy" and "doesn't take no for an answer." Worse, when asked to describe the candidate overall, the mentor said, "Have you met him? Then you know how short he is. Really, really short. He has what I call short-man's complex. He comes into a room and he knows he has to dominate it quickly or he'll never get any respect. ..." And on and on. And all with good intent. This man really thought he was complimenting his former pupil.
Holy cow. Never in a million years would my client have thought to remove this fellow from his reference page, and never in a million years would his mentor have intended to harm him. Had we asked the mentor directly, "Are you getting calls? What are you saying?" there's a good chance that the mentor's enthusiasm would have blinded us to the possibility that he was shooting holes in the ship.
Was I wrong to make the calls and let people think I was interested in hiring the job seeker? Perhaps. But I'd do it again in the same circumstances. It's a rare, last-ditch evaluative tool for me to pull out of the bag, but it is a tool and I stand by my advice to use it.
Bottom line? Lying is wrong and I advise against it. But digging into a situation to see what's going on? Finding out if someone else is lying about you? Yes, I would do that.
XAmy Lindgren owns a career-consulting firm in St. Paul, Minn.; reach her at alindgren@pioneerpress.com.