It is not hard to see how Myer executives and Quest Personnel were duped into hiring Andrew Flanagan in 2014. Quest conducted two overseas interviews with referees, who were supposedly senior executives in major retail chains Inditex and Tesco, and checked the documentation before putting Flanagan forward. Then top executives at Myer interviewed him extensively before appointing him General Manager Strategy and Business Development. The plot unravelled when Myer put out a press release and Inditex pointed out they had never heard of him. Flanagan was fired on his first day. See AFR article Myer fires new recruit Andrew Flanagan over fake résumé^[1]

Of course, most of your applicants won’t go to these lengths, but how will you know which ones have?

A couple of actions that can help verify the reference.

• Don’t call referees on mobile phones, you can never be sure they are who they say they are. For the same reason, don’t trust the supplied land line number either, always check the number yourself in a legitimate directory such as the White Pages. Don’t trust a Google search on the company because any results make just be part of the fake history. Use the number you have looked up to call the company switchboard to check the referee’s position in the company and to verify the relationship to the applicant.

• Apart from the standard questions everyone asks, make sure you include a few that mirror the behavioural questions you asked the applicant. For example, you may have asked the applicant “Tell me about a time when you had to deal with conflict at work.” Use the same question with the referee to check for corroboration, conflict or coaching. If the referee tells exactly the same story with the same or similar words you may suspect that it has been made up, or the two have coached each other on what to say. If the story is different but reinforces the behaviours it is probably reliable. If it is a conflicting story, your applicant may have lied.

Let us know if you have a tale to tell on doubtful reference checking.