Reference Interviews

Referee

1. What was your relationship to the candidate?
2. Were you their direct supervisor?
3. How would you describe your relationship - friend, subordinate, worker, superior,
4. With conflict, will it bump up to me?

Work

1. How would you rate the quality of their work?
2. Were you happy with their work?
3. Would you rate the person as one of the best, average, or below average for the position they were in?

General Qualities

1. Timely?
2. Does the person want to take credit or give credit?

Problems

1. What are the work habits of the candidate? Team/own way, , early/late, self-study vs group learner
2. What problems has the person caused, bad habits?

Conflict Resolution

1. Tell me an example of mushroom cloud - and how they handled
2. Were they in charge of mediating conflicts with others? How did they handle them?
3. Casually lead into getting mad. Future pace it: Assuming that they got mad, how did they handle it?

Main Points

1. Up front open up possibility of gaining insight if candidate was excited - by seeing how much communication occurred between candidate and referee.
2. Describe position, describe vision. Tell them what person will be doing. Tell them what my expectations are. This is different than before - would the candidate handle it?
3. Conflict doesn't end up on my lap.
4. How many different balls can they juggle? Multiple budgets, projects, timeframes? Engineer, farmer, and general contractor. Straight up - X will be doing x,y,z? Can she do it.
5. Keep it to about 15 minutes.