You Called Three References and All of Them Said He Was Great
Reference checks come back positive almost every time, which means they carry almost no information. Here's how to redesign the call so it produces something you can actually use in a hiring decision.
By JobPost Team · Sep 11, 2026 · 4 min read
Three calls, three good reports, and you still know nothing you didn't know before you dialled. That isn't bad luck with references. That's what the reference check is built to produce.
A Signal With No Variance Is Not A Signal
The candidate chose these three people. They chose them the way you'd choose three photos of yourself for a dating profile. Nobody submits the manager who put them on a performance plan. Nobody submits the peer who had to redo their work.
So the base rate of a positive reference is close to one hundred percent. When a test returns the same result for every candidate, passing it means nothing. You are not measuring the candidate. You are measuring whether they can name three adults who like them, which is a much easier test and one you already gave them implicitly when they showed up to the interview on time.
This is why the reference call feels so strange. You spend fifteen minutes on a warm, vague conversation, hang up, and write "references positive" in the file. That note has the shape of evidence without any of the content.
What Canadian Employers Will Actually Tell You
There's a second problem stacked on the first. Many employers here won't say much of anything.
Plenty of Canadian HR departments have a standing policy: confirm title, confirm dates of employment, decline the rest. That policy usually gets explained as a legal requirement. It generally isn't. Canadian courts have long recognized that an honest, good-faith assessment given to someone with a legitimate interest in receiving it — a prospective employer — sits on much safer ground than employers assume. The blocker is risk-averse policy, not the law.
But policy is what you're calling into. Which means the useful reference is rarely the official one. It's the former manager who has since moved to a different company and no longer has a comms team standing behind them, or the peer two levels sideways who has no policy to cite.
One rule before you go looking: get the candidate's consent, in writing, for who you will contact. Under federal and provincial privacy legislation you need it, and beyond the legal point, calling someone's current employer without permission can cost them the job they still have.
Questions That Can't Be Answered With "Great"
The fix is not being more suspicious on the call. Suspicion makes references defensive and defensive references retreat to platitudes. The fix is asking questions where "he was great" is not a grammatically available answer.
Comparative questions work because they force a distribution:
- "Of the people you've managed in that role, where would he land — top quarter, middle, bottom quarter?"
- "Who's the strongest person you've had do this job, and how was he different from them?"
Conditional questions work because they let the reference be honest without being negative:
- "What kind of manager gets the best work out of him? What kind of manager would frustrate him?"
- "If I put him on a team with no process and no documentation, what happens?"
- "What would you have him do differently if you were still working together?"
And the one question worth asking every time: "Would you hire him again, into what role, and why that one?" The hedge lives in the second and third parts. "Yes, absolutely" followed by a five-second pause and a narrower role than the one you're hiring for is the most information you'll get in the whole call.
One more move that costs nothing: at the end, ask who else the reference would suggest you speak to. Sometimes you get a name the candidate didn't offer. Then ask the candidate for permission to call that person, and pay attention to how the request lands.
Listen For Structure, Not Verdict
Stop scoring the call as pass or fail. Score it as description.
A useful reference gives you a shape: this person does their best work when the problem is already defined, they need a deadline they didn't set themselves, they're slow to trust a new team and then loyal for years. None of that is good or bad. All of it is predictive, because you know whether your team looks like that.
What you're listening for is specificity. A reference who worked closely with someone can produce detail without effort — a project, a bad quarter, a fight they had, how it resolved. A reference who was three doors away and is doing a favour produces adjectives. When you get adjectives, ask for an example. If the example doesn't come, you've learned that this person doesn't actually know the candidate well, which is itself worth writing down.
Silences matter too. Not as gotchas, but as places to follow up. "You paused there — what were you thinking?" is a completely fair question and people answer it more often than you'd expect.
Decide Before You Dial
Here's the discipline that makes all of this work: write down, before the call, what would change your mind.
If the honest answer is "nothing — we're hiring him," skip the references and tell yourself the truth about your process. If the answer is "I'm not sure he can manage people who've been here longer than him," then you have a call to make and a question to ask, and the fifteen minutes will earn their keep.
Three people said he was great. Ask what he was great at, under what conditions, compared to whom. That call is worth making.