Executive Reference Checks: What a Board Learns About You

An executive reference check at board level is rarely a form sent to two people you chose. By the time a chair is ready to appoint, the references the board relies on most are often from people the candidate did not put forward. A chair rings a former chair they trust. An investor rings an investor. A director rings someone who sat on a committee with you six years ago. JOH Partners, which has closed more than 1,000 senior mandates since 2014, sees this pattern on mandates for boards and investors across the Gulf, the United Kingdom and Singapore. This guide is for chief executive, C-suite and aspiring board candidates at the final stage. It explains what boards actually learn, how to prepare the referees you name, and what to do about the calls you cannot control.

It sits alongside the other board-level interview guides. References are one part of the wider testing described in executive assessment: what a board tests, and they usually become a condition of the offer discussed in negotiating an executive job offer.

What does an executive reference check look like at board level?

There are two layers, and candidates mostly prepare for one.

The first layer is the formal reference. You name two or three people, usually a former chair or chief executive and perhaps a peer or an investor. The search firm or the company's human resources team speaks to them, often late in the process and often as a condition of the offer. The conversation follows a list: dates, role, scope, strengths, development areas, whether they would work with you again. Some employers will only confirm dates and job title, so a formal reference on its own can be thin.

The second layer is the back channel. Nobody sends you a form and nobody asks your permission. A chair uses their own network to find someone who has worked with you, and asks a few open questions. "What is she like when the board disagrees with her?" "Did his team stay?" "Would you put him in front of your own shareholders?"

Boards trust the second layer more, because you did not choose the speaker. They use the first layer to test the story you told in interview, and the second to find out what you left out.

The references that count are the ones you did not choose

This is the part most candidates would rather not think about. You cannot prepare the person you did not nominate. You can prepare the account they will hear it against.

The practical rule is simple. Tell the same story about every past role to everyone, in the same terms. If you tell the board that you left a company because the strategy changed, then a former colleague who says you were removed after a disagreement with the chief executive makes you look careless at best. If your account was accurate and complete, the same colleague will confirm it.

Think of each role in your last ten years and ask who else could be rung. The chair who hired you. The chief executive you reported to. The finance chief who sat next to you. A direct report who stayed, and one who left. A major investor or a lender. For each, ask what they would say if a stranger rang tomorrow and asked for one thing you do well and one thing you find hard. If you cannot answer, you do not yet know how you are seen.

Assume the board will speak to the person you would rather it did not. Then make sure what they say matches what you told the board yourself.

How do you prepare the referees you do name?

Start by choosing people for what they have seen, not for their title. A former chairman who watched you through a crisis is worth more than a famous name who met you twice. Aim for variety: someone senior who hired you, a peer who worked beside you, someone who reported to you, and if the role faces investors, one person from that side.

Then ring each of them. Do not send an email and wait. Tell them what the role is, why you want it and who is likely to call. Say what the board will probably probe. If a referee does not seem keen, thank them and choose someone else. A lukewarm reference is worse than none.

Give each referee your honest weak spot before the board does. "If they ask where I am weakest, I think it is patience with slow committees." That saves you from hearing a version you did not expect. It also makes the reference more believable, because the person who gives it can say something specific and unflattering and still recommend you.

Do not script them. A board that has read a hundred references can tell a rehearsed answer from a remembered one. What you want is a referee who can tell a short story about you: a particular decision, a particular room, a particular result.

A referee who only praises you is not much use to you. The one a board believes will say what you do well, and also what you find hard.

What if a difficult exit is part of your record?

Many senior careers include one. A merger that removed your role. A disagreement with a chief executive. A board that changed its mind about the strategy you were hired to deliver. None of these ends a candidacy. What ends it is an account that shifts.

The rule is to say it first. Raise the exit yourself, early in the process and in plain words, before a back-channel caller does it for you. Say what happened. Say what you would do differently. Say what you learned, in a sentence. Then stop. Do not criticise the people involved, even if you think you were treated unfairly. A board does not need to agree with you; it needs to see someone who can describe a hard episode without blame.

Check what any settlement agreement allows you to say and to whom, and take legal advice if there is doubt. The commercial side of an exit is covered in executive severance in the Gulf, which is useful background to the terms you may be bound by.

Gaps need the same treatment. If you took six months out, say why, and say what you did. A board is relaxed about time away and anxious about vagueness.

Why does one trusted call outweigh five letters in a Gulf group?

In JOH's observation, boards in family-controlled and state-linked groups weigh a single trusted voice more heavily than a pile of written references. This is a pattern we have seen on mandates, not a measured statistic. The reasons are practical.

Gulf business is small at the top. Chairs, principals and investors often know each other, or know someone who does, so the person making the back-channel call is rarely calling a stranger. The person called is usually speaking to someone they respect and may have to see again. They will say more, and more plainly, than a referee writing a letter.

A written reference also does a different job. It is a record, and it is signed. The call is where judgement happens. A letter that praises you and a call that says "talented, but I would want to know how he deals with the family" will be read together, and the call will win.

This is why searches for group holdings and the family and principal-led businesses behind them depend so heavily on relationships. Our anonymised case study of a group leadership build at a Saudi industrial holding company, where three group functional leaders were appointed in one search, is an example of the kind of mandate where this applies. In investment businesses the same test often arrives through a different door, a call to a co-investor or a fund investor, which is the world of private equity and investment businesses.

The lesson for you is not to try to steer who is called. Do not ask a senior person to "put in a word" unless you trust what they will say. An offered word that sounds like lobbying can do more harm than silence.

What does a board do with what it hears?

A competent chair listens for patterns, not single remarks. One person describing you as impatient is a data point. Three people describing the same quality in different words is a finding, and the chair will want to hear your explanation of it.

The most damaging thing a board can hear is a mismatch. If your account in interview and the account of a former colleague cannot both be true, the board stops trusting the account that was easier to check. A harsh but accurate reference is survivable. A gap between what you said and what the reference said usually is not.

Boards also use references to decide how to bring you in. If three people say you are brilliant at the work and weak at handling the board, the chair knows where to put effort in the first year. Good candidates treat that as a service, not a threat. The nomination committee process explains how boards put these inputs together, and how the Gulf market for retained search works is covered in JOH's research on retained executive search in the GCC.

A reference is a measure of trust earned slowly, and the question under every call is whether the people who worked with you would work with you again. Christian Nyholm on building trust in teams is worth hearing on how that trust is built.

How can you find out what your references will say?

Ask. Ring a person you trust, who knows your work, and say: "If someone asked you what I am like to work for, what would you tell them? And what would you say I find hard?" Write down the answer without arguing. Do it with three or four people across different roles. Where the answers agree, you have found something true about yourself.

If you would like a prompt for that conversation, AssessYou is the candidate platform from JOH Partners. Its free self-awareness interview question bank on AssessYou, with how to approach each question and example answers includes the question on what your previous employers would say about you and what they would call your weaknesses, which is the one a back-channel caller is really asking. The full list of free banks is at assess-you.com/interview-questions, with no sign-in needed. When you are ready to practise on your own CV and get candid feedback on every answer, sign up to AssessYou.

A reference cannot make you into someone you are not. It can only confirm, in someone else's voice, what you have already told the board. The work is done years before the call, and what you can do now is make sure the story you tell is one you could hear repeated back.