Amazon ditched formal reference checks because they're always positive and rarely change hiring decisions. The company uses informal backdoor references instead, which the speaker says are more effective and save time.
Do you know how Amazon runs their company? When they hire people, they remove the reference checks because they found that reference checks are useless. They might do backdoor reference checks, but like, let's say I'm hiring you, Neil, whoever you're going to give me is going to put their best foot forward. And it's like you never make a negative decision off of like people's references. So you end up wasting a bunch of time. And I thought about it for a second. I was like, yeah, those references have never helped me. The backdoor references have helped, never going direct. And so I'm like, oh, that's going to save a lot of time.
