The reference that did not check out

Recruiting senior talent involves a great deal more than searching and shortlisting. It needs functional expertise, and increasingly it needs something closer to detective work. This is a recent example that stayed with me.

A client came to us with a candidate they had already shortlisted for a CFO role. Their ask was narrow: conduct one final interview and handle the reference checks. Everything about the file looked fine.

The call

During my conversation with the reference they had provided, something felt off. The person I was speaking to did not sound like the owner of a 500 crore business. Nothing they said was wrong exactly. It simply did not fit.

Everything appeared fine on the surface. My instinct said otherwise, and instinct is not evidence, so we went and looked.

We reached out to contacts inside the company where the candidate claimed to be currently employed. They had been asked to leave several years earlier, for non-performance among other things. A number of claims on the CV did not survive independent verification. And the owner who had taken my call was a friend of the candidate, briefed to answer the phone.

Once they understood that we knew, they stopped responding altogether and disappeared.

What it cost, and what it nearly cost

It is disheartening to run into this. It is also a reminder of an old idea that predates all of us: caveat emptor. Do the diligence before the decision, not after it.

The saving that tempts people here is the search firm's fee. It is a real number and it is visible. The cost of the alternative is not visible until a company has handed its finance function to someone who lied to get in, and by then the number is much larger and much harder to talk about.

I do not have a tidy lesson from this beyond the obvious one. The part I still think about is that everything checked out until the moment I decided to keep pulling.