Previous Employment Reference

jimmy1672

Hi,

I've just accepted a job offer and my new employer has indicated that they will contact my current employer to verify that I worked there.

Does anybody have any idea what sort of information my new employer will be looking for? Can my current employer reveal my salary to my new one?

Thanks

Mrs OBumble

Potentially they can look to validate any information that you've provided.

I think it's unlikely they'll reveal salary, unless it's phrased as

"Jimmy1672 said that he worked as a widget-woggler from Jan 1999 - Aug 2015 and that his current salary is E25. Can you confirm that"

reallyrose

I would never ask about salary on a reference call and I've never had a client ask this either. (Sometimes they ask me what someone is on now but they've never asked me to confirm this with the employer. It's none of their business)

We have our own reference form and some clients ask us to use theirs instead. I've taken dozens of references and what gets (generally) asked is:

Motivation for leaving the current company
Job title and dates of employment
What were your duties while working there.
How did you get on with other team members/subordinates/managers/
How was your attendance/timekeeping
What are your strengths/weaknesses as an employee
Would they hire you again?

Questions like that. I've never taken a bad reference - the worst ones are a bit lukewarm.

Noopti

Reference checks are these days usually very very basic. As in, "I can confirm that X worked here for Y time, doing Z".

The reason for this is that previous employers can land themselves in serious hot water if they sully someones name and prevent them gaining new employment with anything other than hard facts. For example, saying "X was late for work a number of times, and phoned in sick quite often".

If the above happened, and X didn't then get the job (and it being obvious that it was the reference check which scuppered it seeing as they had a provisional offer on the table) then X could easily take the previous company to task. They would need to be able to back up their claims 100%, and if not could be in serious trouble.

The usual sink or swim question asked is "Would you hire X again?". It is a simple yes/no - but even then it can be problematic. Why would a company risk saying "No" and getting any grief when it is no skin of their back to just say Yes. X isn't their problem anymore. Any previous employer giving an "opinion" (eg: "What is X's weaknesses") is asking for trouble with literally nothing to gain from doing so.

Putting job offers on the table before checking references is something I didn't think was very common these days, also for the above reasons.