I hate the whole concept of references. I don’t want to ask a favor from someone in my past. I don’t want to keep contact info for former bosses or co-workers.
Our society is like:
Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.
Have personal responsibility.
Your success or your failure is 100% due to your good or poor choices.
Employers: “By the way, you are going to need help from some strangers in your past in order to get a job with our company.”
Companies are constantly trying to figure out how to pay workers less. I would absolutely take less money if the hiring process didn’t have so much hoop-jumping. How has capitalism not figured that one out yet?
I hope the info my references give on me is a little more nuanced than “they were good.”
Maybe something like “they’re one of the best at innovation. They actually came up with engineering solutions that allowed us to overcome bottlenecks and exceed our goals.”
You can bet 99.9% of applicants don’t get that kind of reference.