By the time most of us pick up the phone for a reference check, we've already decided. The candidate handed us the names. The names were chosen because they'll say something kind. And the questions we ask — "What are their strengths? Any weaknesses?" — invite exactly the answers everyone has learned to give. It's a ritual we perform to feel diligent, and it almost never changes an outcome. If a step in your hiring process can't change your mind, it isn't a check. It's a formality.
I kept doing them anyway for years, because skipping them felt reckless. What finally changed my mind was noticing how often a great reference call preceded a hire that didn't work, and how rarely the call had warned me. The problem wasn't the references. It was the questions. I was asking people to summarize a human being in adjectives, and adjectives are where the truth goes to hide.
Ask about situations, not qualities
Now I don't ask what someone is like. I ask what happened. Tell me about a time this person was wrong and how they handled being corrected. Tell me about the hardest stretch you worked together and what they were like during it. Walk me through a decision of theirs you disagreed with. Specific situations are much harder to sand down into a polite non-answer, and the texture of a real story tells you more than any rating out of ten ever could. The pauses tell you something too.
The question that actually works
The single most useful thing I've learned to ask is this: would you hire this person again, and for what exactly. Not "would you recommend them" — of course they would, they're on the phone. The "for what exactly" is where it gets honest. People will happily rehire someone as an individual contributor while going quiet about whether they'd hand them a team. That gap, gently explored, is often the whole story. And when a reference lights up with something they weren't asked — some detail they clearly wanted me to know — I've learned to weigh that more heavily than anything on the résumé.
None of this makes reference checks predictive. Hiring stays a decision made with incomplete information, and anyone who tells you they've solved it is selling something. But a reference call can go from theater to signal if you stop asking people to grade someone and start asking them to remember them. The goal isn't a verdict. It's one or two specifics concrete enough to change what you do next — and if you're not open to that, it's kinder to everyone to skip the call.