Recruiters use online contacts as job references

Job interviewees, beware: Your prospective boss may have called your references before you walk through the door — and they may not be the contacts you provided.
Professional networking sites such as LinkedIn Corp. and Jobster Inc. are making it easier for employers to get in touch with people who have worked with job candidates in the past or know them personally. Recruiters say they use such sites — where people create online profiles and then link to professional colleagues who are also members — to find mutual connections they can hit up for information. Many hiring managers say they even check to see if they have mutual connections with a candidate on Facebook and MySpace, the popular social-networking sites.

The trend, which started mostly with Web-savvy recruiters in the technology industry, is now spreading to other industries such as human resources and financial services, says Cathy Henesey, talent-acquisition leader at American Standard Cos. Recruiters typically use networking sites to check on entry-level and midlevel job seekers, she says. But even professionals and CEOs have experienced the practice, often referred to as “informal reference checking.”
Traditionally, recruiters call references after a thorough face-to-face interview. The contacts are provided by the job seekers and are typically people who are likely to provide a positive recommendation.

But for a growing number of job seekers (LinkedIn now has 14.8 million members), networking sites have “completely changed everything,” says Dennis Smith, senior recruiting manager at T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG. Now, recruiters can access entire personal networks, says Smith, who checks Facebook, LinkedIn and Jobster for mutual connections before he interviews a candidate in person.
Because online contact lists are typically viewable right on members’ profile pages, hiring managers can quickly identify relevant contacts and confidentially message these people through the networking site.

Such reference checking exposes job seekers to certain risks. Many site users routinely connect online to people they have only a glancing relationship with — say, someone who simply works at the same company — and there is no guarantee that the references will be favorable.
But such checking can work to a job seeker’s advantage, too. Chandan Mahajan says his LinkedIn profile — which lists his previous work experience, displays eight recommendations from former colleagues and shows that he has more than 100 connections online — helped him land a job in May as a business-development manager for Wipro Technologies, the global information-technology-services business of Wipro Ltd. The recruiters at Wipro “did say there were a couple of people they knew in my network,” says Mahajan, 28, of East Brunswick, N.J.

Wipro Technologies confirms that it contacted some of Mahajan’s connections after the first interview. “We did every informal reference check,” says Madhulika Goel, the company’s manager of strategic resourcing. In fact, Wipro didn’t ask him for a standard resume during initial interviews, opting instead to use Mahajan’s online profile.
For job seekers, “it’s kind of a caution and an empowerment,” says Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg. If your online profile is clean and you are connected to people through social networks who would say favorable things about your abilities, it may help you land the job, he says.

Some recruiters believe the tactic can backfire. “You have to be careful referencing people who have jobs because you might blow them out of their jobs,” says Chuck Wardell, managing director at executive recruiter Korn/Ferry International’s Eastern Region. He says he doesn’t use networking sites.

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