It’s an all-too-familiar scenario: After a new employee is onboard, a company slowly realizes that the fit just isn’t right. The candidate, who seemed so promising in the interviews, doesn’t perform as expected. So, sadly, everyone loses. The candidate fails to deliver as expected, the hiring manager becomes frustrated, the organization loses productivity and the recruiting function’s credibility slips a notch.

The secret to avoiding such everyday setbacks in hiring is, of course, having better information at the time of making the hiring decision. Traditional reference checking, often done as a formality after the employment offer is extended, uncovers too little too late to be of real value in the decision-making process.

Pharmaceutical health care company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) decided to turn the whole selection process on its head. It front-loaded the reference-checking process with in-depth information collected from each candidate’s managers, peers and direct reports: information that hiring managers could review and use before completing their interviews. The idea elevated reference checking to a more strategically valuable behavioral assessment by those with firsthand knowledge of the candidate’s performance at work.

Open to Improvement
In mid-2007, GSK was transitioning to a new CEO and addressing new business objectives that included simplifying its business model. This entailed adopting standardized approaches where possible and finding ways for the corporation’s 100,000 global employees to work more efficiently and effectively. The company’s far-flung talent acquisition department, numbering roughly 120 people, was charged with improving employee retention rates and the quality of hires while driving down recruitment costs.

The company’s then vice president of global talent solutions, Lou Manzi, and the head of global talent for GSK’s strategic staffing functions, Jerod Funke, were intrigued by the idea of adopting a software solution for gathering meaningful feedback from candidates’ references. Their hope was that the Web-based tool would be more efficient and productive than relying on phone-based reference checks. They found that the latter were time consuming and often irrelevant during the decision-making process, since the information gathered was inconsistent and unreliable. References were often reluctant to raise red flags for fear of confidentiality breaches or of being held liable for making negative comments about a candidate.