For the past twelve weeks we defended a simple idea, and one we believe is hard to argue against: work references aren’t obsolete, they’re unstructured. The problem was never asking for them, but the way we ask — too late, with no shared script, with nothing that lets you compare one candidate against another. We gathered it all into a manifesto and a complete guide that’s still there for anyone who wants the full framework.
We’re not going to repeat that argument. If you’ve been reading us these past weeks, you already share it. And if you haven’t, the links above tell it better than a paragraph could.
We want to talk about something else. Because throughout the series, the question you kept sending back — by message, in comments, on a call — was never about the why. It was always a version of the same how:
“Fair enough. But how do I actually run this in a real process without it taking half an afternoon per candidate?”
It’s a fair question. And an awkward one, because it points to the real reason structured references haven’t caught on: it isn’t that recruiters don’t want them. It’s that doing them properly, by hand, is an enormous amount of work. Defining the skills to assess for each role. Writing questions that make comparison possible. Chasing referees one by one. Collecting what they say. Organising it. Summarising it for the client. When you have eight open processes at once, rigour is the first thing to go. Not out of carelessness: out of survival.
What we hadn’t told you until now
That’s where what we’ve been building comes in — and what, deliberately, we hadn’t talked about.
StarmyCV was born from that tension
How to make a structured reference — comparable, with context, verifiable — cost a recruiter less time than the usual informal call, not more.
It isn’t another manifesto. It’s the tool we use to do, in practice, what we’ve spent months defending in theory.
Over the coming weeks we’re going to show it from the inside. No sales pitch: just showing how it solves each part of the problem we described.
If you work in recruiting, this one’s for you: each instalment covers a specific part of the process that eats your hours today, and how to stop doing it by hand without losing rigour.
- 1How a process gets set up in minutes instead of an afternoon.
- 2How references get collected without you chasing anyone.
- 3How you know the person assessing is who they say they are.
- 4How, at the end, you have a report ready for your client without having written it.
If you’ve made it this far following the series, this is the second half of the same conversation. The first was about why it matters. This one is about how it’s done.
More soon.
