A short YouTube "Daily Burst of Knowledge" by Anthony Onesto (host identifies the date as Friday, January 27). He argues that traditional reference checks are largely ineffective—most referees give uniformly positive responses—and urges rethinking hiring verification. Suggested alternatives include using social channels, technology/AI analysis, and temp-to-hire trials; he closes with a Mike Tyson quote emphasizing real-world testing.
Questions this video answers
Anthony Onesto (introduces himself as Anthony Ernesto).
Friday, January 27 (spoken in the video).
Chapters
Everyone, it's Anthony Ernesto. And this is my daily burst of knowledge for today. Friday, January 27th, TGIF. And today I want to call BS on references. For how long? At least, you know, two decades in my own career, we've been checking references. You know, the candidate gives us three or four people to reach out to. We reach out to those folks, and most of the time they say nothing but great things. Even the most intuitive interviewer or, you know, journalistic person that dives deep into these things, maybe get some valuable information out of it once in a while. But for the most part, you know, frankly, let's again call bs and references are not very useful. So why do we keep doing these things? You know, it's like performance reviews. For so long, we knew that they had little business impact, but yet we kept doing them year over year. So rethink references. You know, maybe there's a better way through social channels, you know, technology or AI analysis. There's. There's better ways to really understand what a person's like within an organization, or there's better ways to think about it. Maybe we, you know, there's temp to hire opportunities, so you can really get an understanding of how someone works in an organization. You know, Mike Tyson has the best quote, right? You can, you can take all the strategy you want until you get punched in the face, right? So we don't know what someone's like until they actually work in the organization. So that's my daily burst for today. I try to make you think about HR a little bit differently in these things. And so hopefully there's some food for thought there. And so have a great weekend, and we'll see you on Monday.
