Why reference checks matter more when you hire directly
When you hire through an agency, someone else has, in theory, done the checking: the agency vetted the candidate, spoke to past clients, and put its own margin behind the placement. When you hire directly, with no middleman, that vetting is yours to do, and the reference check is the cheapest, most under-used tool in the whole process. An interview is a performance, and a good candidate has rehearsed it. A skills test shows you one piece of work on one day. A reference is different in kind: it is the only part of hiring where you get to talk to someone who has already run the experiment you are about to run, at their own expense, for months or years.
The economics are hard to argue with. A reference check costs you one email and perhaps ten minutes on a call. A wrong hire costs you weeks of onboarding, the work that was done badly or not at all, and the emotional overhead of ending the engagement, after which you start the search again from zero. Two ten-minute conversations that meaningfully reduce the odds of that outcome may be the highest-return half hour in your entire hiring process. Yet many employers skip the step entirely, usually because they are not sure what to ask, or because by the time a favourite candidate emerges they have quietly stopped looking for reasons to say no.
That last tendency is worth naming, because it is the real enemy of a useful reference check. By the final stage you want the candidate to be good: you have invested hours in them, you like them, and the role has been open too long. The reference check exists precisely to interrupt that momentum with outside evidence. Done honestly, it usually confirms your judgement, and you make the offer with real confidence instead of hope. And on the occasions it does not confirm your judgement, it has just done you the single most valuable favour available in hiring: it stopped a mistake you had already decided to make.
How to run a reference check properly
Start with consent. Ask the candidate for two referees, tell them you will actually contact them, and never approach a current employer without the candidate's explicit permission, because you can cost someone a job they still need. The most valuable referee is a recent direct manager, or, for freelance assistants, a client who worked with them over a sustained period; those people saw deadlines, mistakes, and recoveries, which is exactly what you need to hear about. A colleague can add texture but rarely changes a decision. Be reasonably flexible if the candidate cannot offer their current manager; be more curious if a candidate with years of experience cannot produce any manager or long-term client at all.
Before you weigh a referee's words, spend two minutes confirming the referee is real. This matters in any hiring process and a little more in a fully remote one, where you may never meet anyone involved in person. A work email address at the company where the candidate says they worked, or a LinkedIn profile whose role matches the story, is usually enough. What you are guarding against is not elaborate fraud, which is rare, but the mild version: a friend presented as a former manager. A referee reached at a plausible company address, who speaks with specific, unprompted detail about actual work, settles the question fast, and asking the candidate for that kind of contact is entirely normal.
Then keep the conversation itself short, structured, and mostly silent on your side. Ten to fifteen minutes is plenty. Open by confirming the relationship in the referee's own words, verify the basics, and then ask open questions and let the answers breathe: the pauses are data. Take notes as you go, because the difference between "an enthusiastic yes" and "a yes after a beat" will not survive two days in your memory. And close every call the same way, with a thank-you and the assurance that the conversation is confidential, which is also a promise you should keep: what a referee tells you is for your hiring decision, not for relaying back to the candidate line by line.
The questions that actually reveal something
Most reference checks fail by asking questions that can only produce compliments. "Was she a good worker?" has one polite answer, and you will get it. The fix is to ask for stories and specifics instead of verdicts. "Can you give me an example of a piece of work that impressed you?" forces the referee to reach into actual memory, and the speed and specificity of what comes back tells you as much as the content. A referee who instantly recalls the spreadsheet that saved a client relationship is describing a real person; a referee who offers only adjectives may be describing a vague goodwill.
The questions that earn their place in a short call are the ones that probe how the person works, not whether they are pleasant. How did they respond to critical feedback? What happened when several deadlines collided? What came back when you handed them something loosely defined? These map directly onto the realities of managing a remote assistant, where you will not be looking over anyone's shoulder and the difference between a good hire and a frustrating one is almost always ownership, communication, and recovery from mistakes rather than raw skill. Role-specific questions then do the fine-grained work: a bookkeeping assistant should be probed on accuracy under review, a customer support assistant on how they handled the angriest customer the referee can remember.
And then there is the closing pair. "Would you hire them again?" is the single most revealing question in the genre, because it converts an entire working relationship into one answer with nowhere to hide; ask it, then stay quiet. "Is there anything we have not asked that we should know?" is its essential partner, the open door through which referees volunteer the thing they were waiting to be asked. Neither question is clever, which is exactly the point: they are simple enough that any hesitation in the answer belongs to the referee's memory of the candidate, not to confusion about the question.
Call or email? Both work, differently
A live call is the richer instrument, for one reason: hesitation is audible. The half-second pause before "yes, definitely" and the flat courtesy of "she was fine" are signals no written answer carries. If the stakes are high, or something in the process has left you uncertain, make the call. This is also where hiring from South Africa is quietly convenient: the country sits on UTC+2 with no daylight saving, which gives UK and European employers a near-total overlap and US East Coast employers a comfortable morning window, so a referee who is a South African manager or client is usually reachable live within a day. You can check the exact overlap for your city with the time zone overlap calculator.
Email earns its place too. It works when the time zones truly do not, it gives a conscientious referee room to answer carefully, and it produces a record you can reread when comparing two finalists a week later. The etiquette that makes email reference checks succeed is brevity and an exit: keep the question list short, say explicitly that a sentence or two per answer is plenty, and offer a call as an alternative for anyone who would rather talk. A referee is doing the candidate and you a favour; the easier you make it, the better the answers get. A practical hybrid many employers settle on is email for the first reference and a call for the one that matters most.
Whichever route you choose, send or ask the same questions. Consistency is what lets you compare candidates fairly, and it protects you from the drift where a favourite candidate's referees get softball questions while the others get scrutiny. The generator above produces both formats from one question set for exactly this reason: choose your sections once, and the call script and the email stay in step.
Reading between the lines
References rarely deliver bad news directly. Managers are decent people talking about someone who asked them for a favour, and in many workplaces there is also a professional caution about saying anything negative on the record. So the useful skill is not extracting criticism but hearing what enthusiasm sounds like when it is absent. Faint praise is the classic tell: "she was reliable" in answer to a question about excellence, "he tried hard" in answer to a question about quality. So is the conspicuous gap, where a referee praises the candidate's personality warmly and says strikingly little about their work. None of these is a verdict on its own; each is a thread worth pulling with one gentle follow-up.
Weigh the answers against what the candidate told you, because consistency is the real test. If the candidate said they ran the client's inbox end to end and the referee remembers them helping with email sometimes, that gap matters more than any single answer. Small differences in emphasis are normal, people remember their own contributions generously, but a pattern of the candidate's account being systematically larger than the referee's is the most reliable warning sign a reference check can produce. The reverse pattern is worth noticing too: when a referee describes the work as bigger than the candidate claimed, you may have found someone who undersells themselves, which is its own kind of good news.
Finally, hold it all with proportion. One lukewarm reference against a strong interview and an excellent skills test is a prompt for one more conversation, not an automatic no; people leave jobs for messy reasons, and not every manager is fair. Two references that independently hesitate on the same theme, though, are telling you something the interview could not. The reference check is one instrument in the panel, and its job is to agree or disagree with the others loudly enough that you look again before you commit.
Where the reference check fits in the hiring toolkit
The reference check sits at the narrow end of the funnel, after the tools that build and filter your shortlist. The job description generator attracts the field, the interview questions generator structures the conversations, and the skills test generator shows you real work. Check references for your final one or two candidates only: it is the most expensive step in other people's time, and it answers a question the earlier steps cannot, which is what this person is like over months rather than minutes.
When the references confirm your choice, the road onward is already paved: the offer letter generator makes the offer warmly and clearly, the contract generator turns it into a written agreement, and the onboarding plan generator plans the first ninety days. And for the strong runner-up whose references you also took, the rejection email generator helps you close the loop generously, which matters, because a runner-up with glowing references is precisely the person you want to answer your next posting.
Reference check FAQs
What questions should I ask in a reference check?
A good reference check covers five things. Verification first: when the person worked with the referee, in what role, and why it ended. Then performance: the quality of their work, an example that impressed, how they took feedback, and how they handled competing deadlines. Then the work itself: questions specific to the role you are hiring for, because a bookkeeper and a customer support assistant fail in different ways. For remote hires, add reliability: their setup, their responsiveness, and whether work moved forward without supervision. And always finish with the two closing questions: would you hire them again, and is there anything we have not asked that we should know. The generator on this page builds exactly that structure for eight common virtual assistant roles.
What is the single most revealing reference check question?
Would you hire this person again? Nothing else compresses a whole working relationship into one answer the way this question does. An enthusiastic yes, given instantly, is the strongest signal a reference check can produce. A pause, a qualified "in the right role, perhaps," or a diplomatic detour into their good qualities is information too, and often the most honest sentence in the whole conversation. Ask it near the end, once the referee has warmed up, and then stay quiet and let them answer. Whatever else you cut from the script, keep this question.
Should I do reference checks by phone or by email?
A call tells you more, because so much of a reference check lives in tone: the pause before an answer, the warmth or flatness in how someone describes a former colleague. If you can talk, talk. But email has real advantages for remote hiring: it works across any time zone gap, it gives the referee time to answer thoughtfully, and it leaves you a written record. A practical pattern is email first with a short question list and an offer to call instead, which respects the referee's time and still opens the door to a conversation. This generator produces both formats from the same questions, so you can switch with one click.
How many references should I check, and whose?
Two is a sensible standard for a virtual assistant hire, and the most valuable referee is a recent direct manager or, for freelancers, a client they worked with for a sustained period. A manager or client saw the things you most need to know: reliability, quality under deadline, and how the person responded to correction. A colleague can add useful colour but cannot usually speak to those. Be a little flexible with candidates whose current employer does not know they are looking; asking for a previous manager instead of the current one is a reasonable and common accommodation.
Is this reference check generator free, and is anything stored?
Completely free, no signup, no watermark, and nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere. The whole tool runs in your browser. Pick the role, choose how the referee knew the candidate, toggle the sections you want, add any questions of your own, and copy the finished script or email. Edit it however you like before using it: it is a starting point that gets the structure right, not a form you must follow.
How do I check references when hiring a South African virtual assistant remotely?
The same way you would locally, with two adjustments. First, verify the referee is real before you weigh their words: ask the candidate for a work email or LinkedIn profile rather than only a personal phone number, and confirm the referee actually holds the role the candidate described. This is basic diligence in any remote hire, wherever the candidate lives. Second, use the time zone to your advantage. South Africa sits on UTC+2 with no daylight saving, which gives UK and European employers an essentially full shared working day and US employers a solid morning overlap, so a live reference call is usually easy to schedule. South African referees are typically fluent, direct English speakers, and a ten-minute call gives you a clear picture.