Posted by References in Polish business practice are associated with a document that is important and usually carries positive content. Therefore, they are quite often used as an element of creating a company’s image when it has fulfilled the arrangements made with another company. Customer references then hang in a highly visible place testifying to the reliability of the addressee.
Despite the adoption in Polish companies of many customs from the United States and Western European countries, references are still rarely issued for departing employees. From a legal point of view, in Poland, a certificate of employment is sufficient for a person who is being fired, which includes the manner of termination of the employment contract and any comments on the reasons for breaking the contract.
In the U.S., references given to laid-off employees are an everyday occurrence. Employers are not only eager to write them, they are equally eager to use this form of information about a candidate’s suitability for a position. The massive scale of companies’ production of information about former employees means that many such cases find their end in court. Employees who have a not-so-positive description of their past careers in their documents complain to the companies with which they were associated that their path to promotion has been closed.
Rhian Blacklock, former head of the Human Resources Department at Oliver Sweeney and a contributor to the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development website, believes that despite some high-profile court cases, giving references to employees is a good practice. – “I always advise HR managers to give either written or verbal references to fired employees,” says Blacklock, “The main problem in recruitment is the inaccuracy of the methods used to evaluate candidates. And yet no one else knows a potential candidate for our company as well as his or her previous employer. That’s why this custom helps everyone involved in recruitment.
In the way references are given to employees, one can recently notice a move away from writing lengthy reviews and citing situations in which the employee proved himself or failed the trust of the boss. Most references have begun to resemble tombstone inscriptions. They are concise, containing only easily verifiable data from the candidate’s professional life and some objective information. In practice, when selecting candidates for a position, such a way of commenting on an employee’s skills and disposition is of little use.
Personnel officers do not want to issue a detailed description of a former employee’s career, because they usually do not have enough data from his supervisor. However, if they write on the document that they will give more information over the phone, it means that they have something more to give.
So how do you make references and what can they be used for? There are several rules for correctly formulating a comment on the past work of the person being fired. We will show them in our next blog post.