Employers (and recruiters) have an increasingly number of good Internet resources at their disposal to scope out and learn more about potential employees using publicly available information that these job searchers are either putting out there themselves or that are available due to their connections and friends on various social networks.
In the old days before the Internet, if you lost track of someone you might look them up in the white pages of the phone book and maybe ask a few friends or colleagues “whatever happened to insert-person’s-name-here.”
These days, you – and other people who might be thinking of hiring you – can use your LinkedIn profile and other networks like Facebook, Twitter or MySpace to locate people who have worked with you in the past or who might be able to speak about you, your skills and experience.
People are increasingly turning to secret references or unauthorized ones where they contact someone who is not on your list of authorized references and get them to do a reference on you.
Personally, I’ve never done this. I find it sneaky and back-handed.
I’d be afraid that in addition to how sneaky it is, I’d end up calling an unauthorized reference who would then tell someone with your current employer that you’re interviewing elsewhere for a new job that would result in you getting a lot of grief.
I suspect if this sort of thing happened and the job searcher finds out about it, there would be a lawsuit filed by the job searcher against the person who started calling unauthorized references. I read an article where a lawyer had suggested that contacting people who are not on your reference list is not illegal, but if it results in your current employer finding out about your job search and making your life difficult, isn’t this going to cause you to look for someone to pay for causing you this trouble?
Plus, it probably won’t look too good on the company doing the secret references once word gets out in the job search community that they’re doing this sort of thing.
Having said that, if you’re going to link up with various people with online social networks that essentially offer public domain information where you understand that other people will be allowed to view it, perhaps nothing wrong is being done?
Still, I don’t like the idea of skulking around looking for people to contact behind a job searcher’s back to do a reference on them. If someone called me unannounced and unexpectedly to do a reference on a former co-worker, the first thing when I’d do when I hang up is call my former co-worker and ask them why this person just called me for a reference without my former co-worker knowing about it.
When linking up with various people through online social networks, I’d be careful to ensure the information and people I’m linking up with won’t come back to haunt me in the future.
