What is up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and CEO of Morning Brew, and welcome back to Founders Journal. My daily audio diary made public for the world where every day I will give you the listener a backstage pass into

building Morning Brew to help you think better in order to build better. And today

we are talking about how to make reference checks. Yes, reference checks.

Actually useful. I think historically they suck and I want to make them suck less for all of us.

Let's hop into it. So in life and in the world of business, there are a lot of things we do just because they've always been done in a certain way. We don't question it and it just seems like the thing, the type of thing you should do.

It's almost like why Morning Brew was originally created because people just felt like they should read the Wall Street

Journal, they've been told to read the Wall Street Journal, there isn't an alternative, and so they just do it.

And in business, nothing feels more applicable to this category of just doing things for the sake of doing things

than reference checks. You have someone late in an interview

process for a role. They're one of your top two candidates and you want to

talk to past coworkers or bosses or direct reports of theirs to feel settled in the decision you're making.

And I want to first say something. This sounds like a boring topic, but if you think about in business,

what a business is, it is all about hiring the right people to make the right decisions, to create the right product so your customers have the right experience.

And reference checks are something that you will have to think about and use in business for the next 20 to 40 years.

And so I implore you to spend some time thinking about this.

And I'll try to make it as painless as possible.

So the issue is I found that these conversations are historically useless and are flawed

from the get-go.

This is how it typically goes. Someone makes it to reference

checks meaning they're one of your last three candidates in an interview process.

You ask those candidates for references they give you three to four references and then you

set up 20 to 30 minute calls with those references and a hundred percent of the

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