Over the years, I’ve concluded that one of the most valuable life (and business) skills is seeing people clearly:

• Who is the person at their core?
• What are their notable and proud accomplishments?
• What are they uniquely good at?
• What are their blind spots?
• What drives them?

When you can see people clearly, you are better at appreciating them, helping them grow, and putting them in a position to succeed. Yet, this is easy to say but hard to do. Each of us brings unconscious biases. The task is more challenging when you have limited interactions with the person, such as in an interview.

Many of us have honed our interviewing skills over the years. Yet, the information and story gathered during an interview are distorted by two sets of filters. The interviewer filters simply by choosing the questions asked and then interprets the answers based on their history. The interviewee answers the questions by selecting facts, examples, and stories they want to present. As in photography, we will get a more distorted image when we add filters upon filters.

We all know references are valuable in corroborating information in an interview. More importantly, they allow us to acquire more signals through different filters. We then apply different weights across all the signals we’ve gathered to bring the picture into focus.

We’ve all asked for references but provided references tend to be cheerleader references. Fed up with these useless references, I have been asking for a person’s worst reference and why since Zappos. Generally, this question puts the conversation into a more vulnerable discussion. Even so, most will come up with an example of when they were right and disagreed strongly, similar to answering that they are perfectionists to questions about their weaknesses. Rarely will someone answer the why part voluntarily. Pulling on these threads provides valuable insights into how introspective the interviewee is and how vulnerable and candid they can be with the interviewer.

Since I’ve asked these questions for over two decades, some have come prepared to answer them, but only a dozen have asked me why I ask them, and only a handful have asked me for my answer. My mom was my worst reference because she cared too much about me not to tell me about my many flaws and didn’t want them to become a liability. The people who see you most clearly should be your best and worst references. What we want is that list of references.