The First Performance Review Reference Call
Ask a cherry-picked referee what feedback you'll give the candidate at their first review — they can't dodge it.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 95%
Reference calls are structurally broken: candidates supply only their favourite managers and best-ever colleagues, so every referee is pre-committed to a glowing review. This technique defeats that bias with a single question that presupposes the hire, forcing the referee into a future frame where negative information is helpful rather than disloyal. It converts a rubber-stamp call into a genuine onboarding brief.
Origin
Paul Adams, Chief Product Officer at Intercom, sharing his favourite reference-call question on Lenny Rachitsky's compilation episode. He devised it because referees are, by selection, the people who liked the candidate most.
Core principles
- 01Referees are selected by the candidate, so their positivity carries almost no information.
- 02Presuppose the hire — asking about the first review implies the person is already on the team, which removes the referee's protective instinct.
- 03Frame the answer as help, not judgement: they are coaching a future manager, not gatekeeping an offer.
- 04The question is undodgeable because the referee genuinely knows the answer and there is no neutral response.
How to run it
- 1
Run the reference call only after you want to hire
Use this at the end of the process, when you have decided you want to give the candidate the job. The question presupposes the hire, so it only works from that posture.
Pro tip Signalling that you intend to hire relaxes the referee and makes candid coaching feel safe.
- 2
Accept the biased referee list without protest
Do not fight the fact that the referees are the candidate's favourite manager and best colleagues. That bias is a given; the question is designed to work in spite of it.
Watch out Demanding a 'neutral' referee list usually just produces a more carefully rehearsed set of allies.
- 3
Ask the undodgeable question
Ask: 'What feedback will I be giving this person in their first performance review?' It assumes the person has joined, assumes there is developmental feedback, and asks the referee to predict it.
Pro tip Ask it plainly and then stay silent. The pause is where the real answer surfaces.
Watch out Do not soften it into 'do they have any weaknesses?' — that version is trivially dodgeable with a fake weakness.
- 4
Treat the answer as an onboarding plan
Whatever the referee names becomes your day-one coaching agenda: the growth area you watch for, the support you put in place, and the thing you actually raise at their first review.
Pro tip If two independent referees name the same feedback, treat it as confirmed and design around it before the person starts.
In the wild
Adams found that in referral calls the referees a candidate provides are, by construction, the best people they ever worked with and their favourite managers. Generic questions to those referees return uniformly glowing, information-free answers. Asking instead what feedback he would be giving the person at their first performance review gave the referee a legitimate, forward-looking reason to name a real limitation.
→ The referee cannot dodge — there is an answer and it is, in Adams's words, incredibly revealing. The call stops being a formality and starts producing usable management information.
Common mistakes
Asking for weaknesses directly
'What are their weaknesses?' invites the rehearsed non-answer (works too hard, cares too much). The performance-review framing is what makes the question inescapable, because it asks for a concrete prediction rather than a character judgement.
Using it as a disqualifier
If you treat the named feedback as a reason to reject, referees will learn to sanitise their answers and word will travel. The output is an onboarding input, not a rejection trigger.
Filling the silence
Interviewers who rush to reassure the referee after asking ('but obviously everyone has something') hand them an escape route. The discomfort of the pause is what produces the honest answer.
Is it for you?
Best for
Hiring managers doing final-stage reference calls on a candidate they already intend to hire, especially for senior or leadership roles
Not ideal for
Early-stage screening, back-channel calls with people the candidate did not nominate, or contexts where you have not yet decided you want the person
From the transcript
“the referees they have are like the best people that they ever worked with and they're favorite managers”
“this question is what feedback will I be giving this person in their first performance review it's an amazing question because the person can't Dodge…”
From the episode
My favorite interview questions from 100+ guests