Here in the UK, while it's not actually illegal to give someone a bad reference, no employer does because an inaccurate reference is grounds for legal action. You have to be able to provide evidence for everything you say. Consequently lots of employers only provide the dates you worked from and to and what your final salary was.

The fallout from someone not getting hired because the "honest downsides" were a bit too honest (or not honest enough) would not be pretty.

This is true everywhere in the sense that there's absolutely no upside to giving someone a bad references. About all you can do for someone terrible is confirm factual data and refuse to comment on any opinion based questions. The requester can't even interpret that as a negative endorsement because lots of companies only do the same thing for good candidates.

Thanks for that perspective. This is a challenge for reference checks in general, and we are cognizant about the legal implications as we develop our product.

I would never give negative feedback about a former employee to anyone ever. I have no guarantee that that information is private, and they could sue me for defamation or a whole host of other things if they found out, especially if it ended up causing them not to get a job. That's real damages.

If you give 'good' feedback that turns out to be wrong in some sense (or it turns out that someone thinks you exaggerated positively), and they hired someone who caused them material damage... would that scenario prevent you from giving good feedback?

But one is considered defamation/libel and can see you in court (at least in the UK) - the other is a slight inconvenience to a company you don't even work at.

Thanks for sharing. We allow references to decline a request for this reason. Also, by pulling references earlier in the process, we mitigate the causation between the feedback and a negative outcome.

> I looked at your sample report, and it seems very much like an expanded "linkedin", where it's just about the positives.

Thanks for pointing that out! Our sample is just an example and does not show the answers to questions about developmental areas.

> Me just saying "oh yeah, they're great", or only talking about the positives doesn't really help as much as a full set of questions which also include honest downsides/weaknesses.

That's great product feedback, thank you. Our questions do pull out these details, and we'll emphasize that more in the future. For example, our questions include: "What colleague would best complement this person" and "How would you help a future manager set this candidate up for success?"