JetUNsetter

There is still out there the old skool expectation to offer referrals to a future employment. There are even CVs ending with the tag line “references available upon request”.

Thank God it is considered old skool, but why are snippets of this out there?

A referral or recommendation only makes sense when you know and trust the referee. If I go to a restaurant recommended to me by a friend as awesome and I am incompatible with the taste and preferences of the friend food wise, I will end up dining in a not so awesome restaurant. G u a r a n t e e. The restaurant is not bad. Neither the friend. Just incompatible. The restaurant is still awesome for its audience just not my cup of tea. Would you trust a total stranger to dictate where you would eat?

Employees would trust a complete stranger to tell them if the person they have met and interviewed themselves is good for their business?? As if the past employer’s business has anything to do with theirs? So the expectation is they will trust better someone they have never met than their own judgement??

The huge difference, is that back in Victorian era, when maids would carry reference letters, the author of the letters were known to the new employer. They were in their social circle and they each know what the standards should be. In our modern era, we copy a practice that is just non sensical under the circumstances!

Why?

And that is a classic in humans. We copy without adjusting, hoping someone’s else success will magically contaminate us too. People wake up at 5am and go to the gym because this is the morning routine of the successful entrepreneur they follow on social media… Really? Without a good product, a good strategy, the hard work and the funding, a morning routine will really get us close enough to the our role model?

The beauty of humans is they can think. Individually. For themselves. They can adjust science, knowledge, circumstances around them to fit them, match their needs. That is how human progress. That is a key ingredient to success.

But copying is so tempting. So comfortably lazy. So awesomely risk free. And the magic of it… takes away responsibility… We can blame the morning routine for not having become millionaires, we can blame the past employer who did not warn us about the visible signs of incompatibility we decided to ignore in the interview… It’s beautiful in the end. That is why we do it when it harm us. In the short term, it takes away the fear of taking control of our own destiny… Please help me make sense of this one too….