[FurnaceFace]

I agree with the thought references are…I’ll say artificial. Unless the candidate is silly and didn’t pick good references then you aren’t typically going to get anything massively concrete.

I think a better use would be firing up LinkedIn and seeing mutual connects and contacting them. The market in Calgary is not that big and chances are the 6 degrees of separation idea can be cut by many degrees. It’s rare in many industries to no have a mutual connection.

I observed this as a young PM many years ago. We were consulting at a company who had just hired a new manager. The senior PM said, “His name is familiar, I think a friend worked with him.” By noon she had all the dirt on the new manager and if he was going to be good or bad for us. It was eye opening how easy this was to collect, This was all pre-LinkedIn too, it’s even easier now. The lesson was “never burn a bridge.”