The other day, one of my coworkers was complaining to me about how much he hates having to call people to check references on prospective employees. I was duly sympathetic, at least up to a point; the fact is that everyone hates to check references, and most people worry (as this fellow does) that the people you are calling will try to make the prospective employee you are calling about look better than they really are, for one reason or another. But I could not bring myself to agree with him when he denounced the entire process as a waste of time. As much as we all hate to do them, sometimes they can be an excellent way of avoiding stepping into something unpleasant.
A case in point came up a few weeks ago, with regard to a rash of several cases of fakery in the newspaper. There was a minor scandal surrounding the autobiography of a woman who claimed to be a Holocaust survivor (and had never even been to Europe), and a slightly larger scandal regarding the autobiography of a woman who claimed to have grown up in a foster South Los Angeles as drug runner and gang mascot (she grew up in an affluent neighborhood in the Valley and attended an exclusive private high school). Either of these stories could probably have been debunked with a very small amount of effort on the publisher’s part, and the failure to run even a cursory background check on either on will cost each publishing company a great deal of money and embarrassment. Neither one compares to the Robert Irvine scandal at the Food Network, however.
For those not familiar with the chef or his program, Robert Irvine is the star of the Food Network show “Dinner: Impossible” in which he attempts to complete various food preparation and cooking challenges with limited resources, time, equipment, supplies, and so on. It’s been a huge success, appealing to many viewers who would never consider watching an ordinary cooking show, and improving the Food Network’s prime-time ratings in many geographic and demographic areas. Part of this success is the reality-show atmosphere of the program; the suspense of whether Irvine will succeed in his “mission” and how he will meet and overcome the challenges involved. Some of it is the man himself; an impressive looking fellow who claims to have cooked for kings and presidents, worked on the wedding cake for Prince Charles and Lady Diana, been knighted by the Queen (and given a castle in Scotland), and earned various other military and professional honors.
Except, unfortunately, he isn’t any of the above. Robert Irvine isn’t a knight; he was not befriended by Prince Charles; he did not cook for any known Royal event or any White House banquet; the University he claims as his alma mater has no knowledge of him, and the chef who actually make the cake for the Royal Wedding has stated publicly that he never heard of Irvine until recently. This last denouncement is hardly surprising, considering that Irvine was born in 1965, and would have been 15 years old at the time of the Royal Wedding in 1981. Even if we are willing to concede that he was some kind of pastry savant, it seems unlikely that anyone would have hired him to work on a project of that importance before he could have gotten a driver’s license…
Why no one at the Food Network thought to check on any of these claims before giving the man his own show is a mystery, especially considering that this is not the first time the Network has had this problem. Last year the winner of their highly-publicized contest to recruit their next network star also ran aground when the probable winner turned out to have falsified his application to the contest (he claimed to have graduated from a culinary school, but had actually dropped out, and claimed to have served with the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq, but had been Stateside during his tour). The Network wound up having to go with one of the runners-up, instead, when a single telephone call to the school in question could have prevented the whole thing.
This is not to say that everyone who applies for a job with your company is a cheat, a liar, or even that they’ve padded their resume. I’m just saying that if someone claims to have been working on a world-class project when their birth certificate says they would still have been in middle school, it’s probably worth taking a moment to call and verify that…
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2 comments:
When you're talking about big media type circumstances, where if "the truth" is found out after the fact, could be very embarrassing, I totally agree that a background check is worthwhile. This is like those background checks limited to simply "yes the person worked here from X to Y and made Z," that is fair.
However, references sometimes are a lot more, requiring 'character' not just verification of prior employment/wages. I've been unemployed a few times, not always of my own choice. Most of the time, its just a personality conflict. Just because I didn't get along with one boss, doesn't mean I won't get along with another boss. But how do I know the boss I didn't get along with is going to give me an ok reference (i.e., I did my job), or a bad one because we didn't like each other? Why should someone who didn't like me now hold sway over whether I get another job, or at least another job at a decent pay?
If you think you are getting blackballed during a reference check, you could have a friend call your previous employer and pose as a prospective employer to double check that they are not saying anything bad. I have seen that done a few times.
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