Nobody Asks for References Anymore

And It’s Slowly Strangling Hospitality to Death

There was a time — not some sepia-toned fantasy cooked up by people who never worked a double — when getting a job in hospitality meant one very simple thing: someone would ask who you’d worked for, and then they’d actually ring them.

Not HR.

Not a form.

A human being picking up a phone and saying, “Alright, what were they really like?”

That moment mattered. It separated the grafters from the fantasists, the solid operators from the walking disasters. It wasn’t about paperwork. It was about survival.

Somewhere along the line, we just stopped bothering.

No announcement. No debate. Just a collective shrug and a quiet agreement that “it’ll probably be fine.”

It isn’t fine. It’s killing us.

Hospitality doesn’t run on systems or SOPs or laminated handbooks. It runs on trust. The messy, fragile kind. You trust people with money, booze, keys, safety, and the emotional state of everyone else on the floor. You trust them at unsociable hours, under pressure, when things go wrong and no one senior is watching.

And yet now we routinely hand that trust to complete strangers whose only qualification is that they turned up to an interview on time and said the right things.

Then we act surprised when it all goes to shit.

We blame the generation. We blame COVID. We blame the labour market. We blame anything except the obvious truth: we stopped checking who the hell we were letting into the building.

The usual excuse is desperation. We’re short-staffed. Everyone’s short-staffed. The rota’s on fire and tomorrow’s service doesn’t care about your principles. So you hire fast. You skip the call. You tell yourself you’ll “see how they go.”

Six weeks later you’re rewriting the rota again because they’ve vanished, stolen, imploded, fallen out with half the team, or simply turned out to be absolutely useless under pressure.

Desperation isn’t a hiring strategy. It’s how you guarantee that the problem comes back louder and angrier.

CVs don’t help. Hospitality CVs are mostly fiction. Everyone was a supervisor. Everyone “ran shifts.” Everyone “thrives in fast-paced environments.” It’s a genre. A reference call cuts through that nonsense instantly. You hear it in the pause. In the tone. In whether the former boss says “yeah” or “well…”

You don’t need to interrogate anyone. One honest question does the job: would you rehire them?

The fact we’ve stopped asking has had a bigger impact than we like to admit. We’ve created an industry with no memory. People bounce from venue to venue leaving damage behind them, confident it won’t follow. There’s no accountability, no consequence, no sense that your reputation actually matters.

Good staff notice. They always do. They get sick of carrying people who shouldn’t be there. They stop caring. Or they leave altogether.

Good operators burn out because enforcing standards feels pointless when every new hire is a coin toss.

And then we sit around wondering why service standards are slipping, why theft is up, why teams feel brittle and angry and exhausted.

It’s not complicated. We removed one of the few pressure valves that actually worked.

People say no one answers the phone anymore. Some don’t. Plenty do. And when they don’t, that in itself tells you something. If someone can’t produce a single former manager willing to say “yeah, they were sound,” in an industry built entirely on relationships, that’s not bad luck. That’s information.

Hospitality is still small. Smaller than we pretend. People remember who was solid at 2am and who disappeared when things got tough. We’ve just stopped bothering to ask them.

This isn’t about being old-fashioned. It’s about being serious. About respecting the fact that this job is hard, and the people who do it well deserve not to be surrounded by chaos merchants and blaggers who should’ve been filtered out with a ten-minute phone call.

If we want to stop bleeding standards, stop burning out good people, stop rehiring the same problems in different bodies, we need to bring references back — not as a box-ticking exercise, but as an act of basic professional self-defence.

Because hospitality doesn’t die in dramatic flames. It dies in small, stupid compromises we convince ourselves don’t matter.

And this one really, really does.