Quick answer: Call the candidate’s direct manager or supervisor from their two most recent jobs, not coworkers, not friends, and not professors. Ask about one specific, job relevant thing at a time instead of general traits. Budget 30 to 60 minutes total for three calls, according to SHRM’s 2023 research on reference checking. It’s worth the time. A bad hire costs a small business far more than an hour of a manager’s afternoon.
Why most reference check questions are a waste of time
Most reference check questions ask about traits, not evidence, and traits are easy to fake on a resume. “Is this person a good communicator” or “how are their presentation skills” are questions almost every candidate has already answered for themselves in their own CV. The reference just repeats it back.
Presentation skills is a good example of this. Nearly every candidate claims strong presentation skills somewhere in their application, whether or not it’s true. If you ask a reference the same vague question the candidate already answered, you get the same vague answer. The only way to actually test the claim is to ask about a specific instance: describe the last presentation this person gave, who was in the room, and how it landed. A real manager can answer that in ten seconds. Someone repeating a resume line can’t.
This matters more than it sounds like it should. Frank Schmidt and John Hunter’s meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin (1998), still the most cited study on hiring method accuracy in industrial psychology, found reference checks predict job performance at a validity of 0.26. Structured interviews and cognitive ability tests score around 0.51, roughly double. Reference checks aren’t useless, but the number tells you exactly how much weight to put on a vague answer versus a specific one. Generic questions push you toward the low end of that range. Specific questions push you toward the high end.
Who you should actually call
Call the direct manager or supervisor, not a peer, not a friend, and not an academic reference. A former manager is the only person on a candidate’s reference list who has actually evaluated their output against a standard and compared it to other people they’ve managed. A coworker or friend has no authority to make that comparison and usually has some incentive to make the candidate look good anyway.
Academic references are the weakest of all for anyone who has already worked. A professor only ever saw this person as a student. A student and an employee are different roles with different expectations, and a professor has no basis to speak to how someone performs under a deadline, handles a difficult client, or takes feedback from a manager. If the candidate has real work history, skip the professor entirely and spend that time on a second former manager instead.
There isn’t one clean study that ranks manager references above peer and academic references head to head, but the research that does exist points the same direction Efe Ergün, Canvider’s cofounder, lands on from hiring experience. Larry Conway and Allen Huffcutt’s 1997 analysis in Human Performance found supervisor ratings had noticeably higher consistency (a reliability of 0.50) than peer ratings (0.37) or subordinate ratings (0.30). A 2025 study in Education Finance and Policy by Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, and Roddy Wolff found that ratings from principals and supervisors reliably predicted future job performance, while ratings from other rater types did not hold up the same way.
| Reference source | What they can actually tell you |
|---|---|
| Direct manager or supervisor | Compared your output to a standard and to other people they managed |
| Coworker or peer | Worked beside you, rarely evaluated your output formally |
| Friend | Personal opinion, no professional basis |
| Professor or academic contact | Saw you as a student, not as an employee |
What you’re legally allowed to ask
You can ask anything relevant to the job. The restriction isn’t on your questions, it’s on what the other side is willing to say back. Most companies now tell managers to confirm only job title, dates of employment, and sometimes final salary, and nothing more.
The case most often cited as the reason for this is Randi W. v. Muroc Joint Unified School District (Cal. 1997). A school administrator’s former employers gave positive references despite knowing about prior misconduct complaints. He was hired by a new district on the strength of those references and later assaulted a student. The California Supreme Court ruled that a former employer can be held liable for a misleadingly positive reference that omits known risks. That single case is why HR departments across the country now train staff to say as little as possible.
Worth knowing before you assume every reference call will be locked down: a review of negligent hiring case law from 1974 to 2022, published by SHRM in November 2023, found only about 435 employer liability decisions in nearly 50 years, an average of roughly nine a year nationwide, and 97% involved high risk roles like ones with access to vulnerable people, driving, weapons, or cash. If you’re hiring a marketing coordinator or a support rep, you’re nowhere near the fact pattern that makes companies nervous. Some managers, especially smaller companies without a formal HR policy, will still talk candidly if you ask specific, job relevant questions instead of open ended ones that put them on the spot.
The actual questions to ask
Skip the generic list. Ask questions tied to the specific job you’re filling.
- Describe the last time this person did [the core task of the role]. What happened?
- What was one thing they did that you wish more people on your team did?
- Was there ever a deadline they missed or a mistake they made? How did they handle it after?
- Would you rehire them for a similar role today? If not, why not?
- On a scale that compares them to others you’ve managed in this role, where do they fall and why?
Notice none of these ask about personality traits directly. They ask for a specific memory or a direct comparison, which is much harder to answer with a polished non-answer.
What this costs you in time
Budget 30 to 60 minutes to check three references properly, based on SHRM’s own reporting on reference checking. For a small business, that hour is small compared to the cost of a bad hire. When you’re a team of ten hiring an eleventh person, that hire changes what the team can do and how much you can trust them with. An hour on the phone before the offer is cheap insurance against months of cleanup after.
Reference checks are also a genuine gap in most applicant tracking systems today, Canvider included. There’s no structured step in most ATS software for logging what a reference actually said or scoring it the way you’d score an interview. Until that changes, the practical fix is to write the answers straight into your interview scorecard or your decision history notes for the candidate, so the reference call carries the same weight in your final decision as anything said in the interview itself, instead of disappearing into someone’s personal notebook.
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Frequently asked questions
What am I legally allowed to ask in a reference check?
You can ask anything relevant to the job. The limit is not on what you ask, it's on what the previous employer is willing to answer. Most companies instruct staff to confirm only job title, dates of employment, and sometimes final salary, because of a handful of lawsuits over negligent or misleading references.
What is an example of a good reference check question?
Ask about a specific part of the job, not a general trait. Instead of asking if someone is a good communicator, ask them to describe the last presentation this person gave to a client and how it went. Specific questions get specific answers, and vague questions get a generic yes.
What not to ask in a reference check?
Don't ask about anything unrelated to job performance, including age, health, marital status, or anything else that would be illegal to ask in an interview. It's also a waste of the call to ask personality questions a reference has no professional basis to answer, like whether the candidate is a nice person.
Should I check references from coworkers or friends?
No. A coworker or friend has an incentive to make the candidate look good and usually has no authority to judge their output against a standard. A direct manager or supervisor is the only reference who has actually evaluated this person's work and can compare it to other people they've managed.