Reference check questions to ask a referee (free set)

Start with the facts only a referee can confirm

The first questions are not about the person at all. They establish that the referee is who they say they are, and that they were actually in a position to see the candidate work:

• Did the candidate work at your organisation?
• What was their job title?
• What were their start and end dates?
• What is your own job title?
• What was your working relationship to them?

None of these ask for an opinion, so they are quick to answer, and they are the ones worth comparing against the CV. An employer who confirms nothing but these five has still told you something — and a referee who cannot answer them is the finding, not a dead end.

The questions that actually tell you something

Once the facts are in, the useful questions are about observable behaviour rather than character. "Was she a good employee?" gets you a sentence that could describe anyone. "How reliably did she turn up and hit deadlines?" gets you an answer you can act on.

The set worth asking, in the order that makes sense to a referee:

• Reliability — attendance, timekeeping, doing what they said they would do
• Quality of work — accuracy and standard of the output itself
• Working with others — colleagues, customers, anyone they had to get along with
• Communication — clear, timely, appropriate to who they were talking to
• Problem solving — what they did when something went wrong or was not covered by a process

Ask each one twice over: once as a rating from 1 to 5, and once as an open question. The rating makes five referees comparable; the sentence underneath is where the actual information is. A referee who rates communication 3 and then writes "brilliant one-to-one, struggled in front of a room" has told you more than the number ever could.

Then the two open prompts that consistently earn their place:

• What were their key strengths?
• What are their areas for development?

And the single highest-value question on the whole form:

• Would you re-employ them? Yes, no, or with reservations.

It is one line to answer and hard to be vague about. "With reservations" from an otherwise warm referee is an invitation to pick the phone up, which is exactly what you want a form to give you.

Reason for leaving — how to word it so you get an answer

This is the question most likely to come back blank, because a cautious referee reads it as an invitation to say something they could be held to. ACAS guidance is that a reference must be accurate and fair, that any opinion should be backed by evidence, and that disciplinary records should not be included unless they are recent and relevant — so a referee who leaves it alone is following the rules, not hiding something.

Two wordings that work better than "why did they leave?":

• "Was their leaving voluntary, and were they under notice at the time?" — a factual question with a factual answer.
• "Is there anything about the end of their employment we should ask the candidate about?" — it lets a referee point you somewhere without making the allegation themselves.

If the answers from the candidate and the referee do not match, that is a conversation to have with the candidate directly, not a conclusion. Most mismatches have an ordinary explanation.

The questions to leave out

Some questions are not just unhelpful, they put you on the wrong side of the law or invite an answer you should never have seen.

Health and disability. Section 60 of the Equality Act 2010 stops an employer asking a job applicant about their health before an offer, outside a short list of exceptions such as reasonable adjustments for the interview itself or an intrinsic function of the job. Routing the same question through a referee does not make it a better idea: ACAS says plainly that a reference should not include absence related to disability, nor mention reasonable adjustments. Do not ask, and if it arrives anyway, do not use it.

Protected characteristics. Age, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity. ACAS's guidance is that a reference should not include information that could be used in a discriminatory way, and specifically not disclose protected characteristics. There is no version of these questions that belongs on a reference form.

Absence and sickness records generally. Even where a detailed reference can include attendance, the exclusions are wide enough — disability, maternity, paternity, adoption — that a general question about absence mostly produces information you have to then ignore. Ask about reliability and deadlines instead, which is the thing you actually care about.

Pay. It tells you nothing about how someone works and, since the ban on salary-history questions became standard practice, asking a previous employer for it reads badly to everyone involved.

First-time hires: academic and personal referees

Someone leaving education or changing career has no previous employer to ask. Two other kinds of referee are worth having, as long as you ask each only what they can honestly answer:

• An academic referee — a tutor, lecturer or course leader — can speak to attendance, meeting deadlines, working in a group and the standard of work. They cannot confirm employment, so do not put employment questions in front of them.
• A personal referee can speak to how long they have known the candidate and in what capacity, and to reliability and conduct as they have seen it. Treat it as character evidence, which is what it is.

The mistake to avoid is sending one form to everyone. A tutor asked to confirm a job title and salary either leaves the form blank or guesses, and neither helps you.

The full question set

Copy this as it stands, or use it as the starting point for your own:

The facts

1. Did the candidate work at your organisation? (Yes / No / I can't confirm)
2. What was their job title?
3. What was their start date?
4. What was their end date?
5. What is your own job title?
6. What was your working relationship to them?

The insight — each rated 1 to 5, with room for a comment

7. Reliability
8. Quality of work
9. Working with others
10. Communication
11. Problem solving

The open questions

12. What were their key strengths?
13. What are their areas for development?
14. Would you re-employ them? (Yes / No / With reservations)
15. Is there anything else we should know?

That is fifteen questions, of which six are one-word answers and five are a number with an optional comment. It takes a referee a few minutes, which is the difference between a reference that comes back and one that does not.

If you are hiring in care or education

The set above is the general one. Two sectors ask for more, and the extra is about the record you keep rather than the questions you ask.

Regulation 19 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 requires that people employed in a regulated activity are of good character, and that the information in its Schedule 3 is available — which includes satisfactory evidence of conduct in previous employment concerned with health or social care, or with children or vulnerable adults. In practice that means you need to be able to show what you asked, who answered, and when. Our guide for care providers covers what that record looks like.

Sending the set, and knowing who answered

You can send these questions yourself, from your own inbox, and most small employers do. What you cannot do from your own inbox is confirm that the reply came from the person you sent it to — which is the other half of the evidence, and the subject of our guide on checking a reference is genuine.

PreHire sends this question set for you and does that confirming as it goes: it checks the referee's email address and the employer record when a referee is nominated, then whether the reply genuinely came from that address, and how the dates the referee gives sit against the candidate's. You get the answers and the evidence behind them in one report, £9 a check. The report is ready minutes after the references you asked for are in, or the closing date has passed.

The question set is yours either way — the chasing is the part worth handing over.