Reference

Last week I had the pleasure of writing a letter of recommendation for a former coworker. I also received an unsolicited recommendation from a classmate on the website LinkedIn. These two events struck me as a possible progress in recommendations, from a paper letter - hand signed - sent in the mail, to an electronic endorsement linked to the professional profile of both the recommended and the person doing the recommending. This made me wonder the future of recommendations.

My first instinct was to discount online referrals since those are easy to forge and very easy to acquire from friends. Then I realized the same held true for the letter I mailed. Any corporate logo can easily be copied, even onto the business card I provided. Quickly I concluded the entire practice is an anachronism dating from times when a person arrived into town with no more than their word and no easy way to trace their history. Letters of recommendation predate telephones. Even after the telephone people had a harder time knowing who to call for a quick background check.

Today there are multiple services online that offer detailed background information about millions of people, harnessing multiple sources of online data (like tax records and Facebook). Easy background checks are readily available. These passive data points lack the personal appeal of a letter, but are probably better indicators of a person's success than the penmanship and grammar of a person biased to like the person. I considered the value of a feedback system (i.e. "12 people recommend Dave for Excel spreadsheets") but that merely inflates the issues with individual recommendations on an aggregate scale.

I think the modern credit score meets the original need for recommendation letters and communicates some indicator of success. I wonder if job applicants will one day post their credit scores on resumes in the space previously devoted to references.