Re: cert discussion

[Brent Chapman <Brent@Covad.COM>]

At 11:27 AM -0500 2/25/98, William LeFebvre wrote:
>Rich Schultz wrote:
>> yet to see a written or oral exam that can measure these well.  On the
>> other hand, if you work with someone for a while, at least six months, you
>> can probably answer all these questions about her.  We already use this
>> form of certification and we call it "references".
>
>Unfortunately, in our ever increasingly litigous society, a
>non-trivial number of former employers are now adopting policies with
>prevent any sort of meaningful references from being given.  I know of
>one former employer who, by organizational policy, was prohibited from
>saying anything beyond "yes he worked for me from this date to that
>date."

In the 3 months I've been here, Covad has almost doubled in size, from 40
to almost 80 employees, and will probably remain on the same curve for the
rest of this year (see <http://www.covad.com/employme.htm> if you might be
interested in joing us).  Doing all that hiring, we've done quite a few
reference checks here in the Silicon Valley in the last few months.  At
least for the positions I've been involved in hiring for (system
administrators and network engineers, mostly), we haven't had any real
trouble getting references to talk candidly to us.  This is especially true
when we know the reference, but it's mostly true even when we don't.  We've
made several "don't hire" decisions based on these references, mostly
because the reference checks made it clear that the candidate wouldn't fit
in well with the organizational culture we're building.  We've also made
several "must hire" decisions based on reference checks, when the
references had glowing relevant things to say.  In general, though, we
haven't had many (if any) cases where referencs have been non-commital.

My opinion is that candidates supply references that they know will talk to
us.  If a company has a strong and enforced policy against candid
references, then the candidates don't give us folks at that company as
references.


-Brent

--
Brent Chapman           Director, Network Architecture
Brent@Covad.COM         Covad Communications Company
408/490-4578            http://www.covad.com/