Ex-employees can hire reference services

Frustrated job hunters often fear that former employers are bad-mouthing them and preventing them from getting hired.

Some ask friends or relatives to pose as potential employers or fact checkers, call and try to find out what's being said.

Suspicions may be confirmed — or not.

Here's another way to do it for a not-too-hefty cost: hire a reference-checking service.

Some job hunters wrongly assume that professional reference checking is available only to employers. Not so. Some companies will run the checks in a job hunter's behalf. These days, that business is strong.

Jeff Shane is vice president of Allison & Taylor Inc., a reference-checking company that has been in business since 1984, serving employers, lawyers and job hunters.

Shane said his company finds that more than half of all reference checks they do elicit negative information. Sometimes the comments they hear are actionable — in other words, things are said that may be grounds for a discrimination lawsuit. The rest of the time, there's no indication of possible illegality, just comments that may be critical or positive about the job candidate's performance.

Depending on the level of reference checking, Shane's company charges individuals between $69 and $99.

For comparison, I checked another service, BadReferences.com, which charges a basic reference report fee of $87.95 for individuals.

What the fees pay for, Shane said, are "people who are trained to do reference checking and who are very skilled at getting the information."