Old habits die hard. In human resources, many companies still seek feedback from references about job candidates, even though the practice rarely yields information that affects the hiring decision.

In 2009, The Children’s Hospital, a rapidly growing magnet hospital in Aurora, Colo., considered eliminating reference checks completely. Reference feedback was not always collected in a timely fashion and was rarely meaningful enough to affect the hiring decisions for its 700 to 1,000 yearly openings. As an alternative, the hospital’s staffing department implemented Web-based technology to gather feedback from references using behaviorally based questions tied to job performance. Reference checking went from impractical to pivotal.

Too Little, Too Late

Like many employers The Children’s Hospital aimed to use telephone-based interviews with references as a final check before offering employment. The hospital required its hiring managers to call references and submit the resulting paperwork to human resources before open positions could officially be closed.

References were hard to reach and even harder to convince to be candid. Thus, there was no real quality check on the information collected, and it was common for job offers to be made before the process was completed. The reference requirement was also a burden for HR to administer, as recruiters had to chase down the paperwork — sometimes for weeks — just to close a job opening.

“The whole process was frustrating and just not adding value,” said Randy Williams, director of staffing at The Children’s Hospital. “I never knew of a time when we decided against making a hire on the basis of reference feedback.”

After reviewing the level of compliance, timeliness and impact of reference checks, and seeing the results were too little and too late to impact hiring quality, the hospital considered dropping reference checks and relying exclusively on recruiters’ screening and interviewing skills. At the same time executives were contemplating this change, the hospital’s screening vendor introduced a new technology as a possible solution.