Agencies may be tempted to follow up a letter of recommendation with a quick email at the end of a long application process, but MSPB has warned that letters of recommendation are poor indicators of future job performance and can easily be ghost written or generated through professional networking sites.
Instead, it urged agencies to actually pick up the phone and call a reference when deciding whether to offer a candidate a position.
MSPB likened reference checks to structured interviews, in which standardized, job-relevant questions would elicit useful responses from each reference provider.
While it’s possible to put those questions in an email, the reference checker loses the ability to follow up immediately on potentially important comments made by the reference, MSPB said.
It said that a conversation provides the opportunity to glean vastly more important information about a candidate than what a selecting official might acquire in an email because it’s too easy to go through the motions when sending documents back and forth.
