Reference Interviews
From Open Source Ecology
Referee
- What was your relationship to the candidate?
- Were you their direct supervisor?
- How would you describe your relationship - friend, subordinate, worker, superior,
- With conflict, will it bump up to me?
Work
- How would you rate the quality of their work?
- Were you happy with their work?
- Would you rate the person as one of the best, average, or below average for the position they were in?
General Qualities
- Timely?
- Does the person want to take credit or give credit?
Problems
- What are the work habits of the candidate? Team/own way, , early/late, self-study vs group learner
- What problems has the person caused, bad habits?
Conflict Resolution
- Tell me an example of mushroom cloud - and how they handled
- Were they in charge of mediating conflicts with others? How did they handle them?
- Casually lead into getting mad. Future pace it: Assuming that they got mad, how did they handle it?
Main Points
- 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? Etc. Goal: up front open up possibility of gaining insight if candidate was excited - by seeing how much communication occurred between candidate and referee.
- Conflict resolution. Conflict doesn't end up on my lap.
- Competence in complexity. 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.
- Did he write protocol?
- Keep it to about 15 minutes.