Any HR people around - job reference employer not responding

[Dreamerinme]

I reigned from my previous employer 8 years ago and have been a SAHM since. I was employed for 12 years with them and had an excellent service record/left on good terms.

I have now been offered a job in a school (no contact with pupils) and my previous employer has not responded to the school’s HR request for a reference which was emailed 12 days ago. Old employer only provide confirmation that you were employed with them on X dates in X role/s, which is fine (I have 2 other references).

The school have asked me to chase up the reference so I rang twice - first time the person I was put through to it went straight to voicemail and I didn’t bother leaving a message because the Receptionist said he didn’t know who to put me through to, and I envisioned my voicemail being ignored. I rang again an hour later and this time the receptionist said he’s just been speaking to their HR Director as he don’t know who to put calls like mine through to, as they’ve just had a restructure and HR haven’t sorted this particular responsibility out yet. So he gave me the same generic HR email that I gave the school and I sent them a polite email to follow up the reference for which I received an automated response (so they definitely have got it). He said the email is ‘live’ and checked.

So, I’m about to lose this job offer if I don’t get the reference response. A former colleague has also heard that there has been redundancies so I don’t think he was lying, but if you are making people redundant then surely you expect to get a surge in reference requests and would have sorted out how on HR will deal with these?! It’s been 12 days when I assume all someone has to do is look me up on the system and confirm my employment details (presumably they also check that you weren’t sacked etc). I genuinely would like to know how time-consuming this is to do.

How many times do I keep contacting them? A friend had her school job offer withdrawn because her references took too long and I’m so stressed that this is so going to happen to me ☹️

Call every day, every hour if needed, they'll want it dealt with to stop you calling! My team has an SLA of 72 hours for references but it sounds like your old place is a bit disorganised. Maybe ask the school if a Character Reference could replace the employer ref, sometimes for DBS they allow this. Good Luck.

Thank you for this - I will try calling daily until hopefully they do it. I have now supplied details for a character reference, but I feel so annoyed and frustrated with them.

@Dreamerinme sorry to jump on your thread above but I’ve been having a similar issue although it’s been 5 days for me. Some companies are just incompetent sometimes!

If you resigned 8 years ago they may not be able to provide a reference anyway as the records shouldn’t be maintained for longer than 6 years.

I work in HR.

That’s incorrect. It’s not one size fits all and it depends on the type of the data. They will as a minimum have a record that she was employed by them along with her start and finish dates. Sometimes the guidance is that certain data should be retained for a minimum period, rather than a maximum.

Where this information is held though is another thing. I left education in 2015 and when I last needed a reference my details had been migrated to a different database, so it took longer to get at and I did have to make a couple of calls to people who luckily remembered me!

@Dreamerinme whilst the time limits are not ideal I suggest you write to the Data Protection Officer and do a Subject Access Request asking for copies of your full employment record. You can put that what you actually need is written confirmation of your employment start and end dates.

You should find the DPO’s email in the organisations privacy policy.

Yes it’s a nuclear option but all you want is a reference.

If it's just that, national insurance could help. The last P45/P60? I think the dpo could take a while to reply.

Ask your new employer if they would consider starting you on a conditional contract to remove the time pressure on this? You can continue to chase it up until you get it.

I am the Safeguarding Governor for a primary school and it is not unusual for one of the two references required to take quite some time to appear. And we will quite often go ahead with employment especially if we have received your DBS, but we do have it flagged on our Single Central Record. The worst offenders are... other schools!

Keep calling and hassling them, they'll want to get it sorted to stop you bothering them.

In the meantime, do you have the contact details of your old line manager or another manager there? If not are they on LinkedIn and could you drop them a message? I've provided names of referees that were senior managers before rather than the standard HR reference.

I work in HR, our retention periods are 7 years due to GDPR so anything older than that will be deleted.

Updating this to say after chasing the new employer finally got a reply to say they needed a consent letter from me to say they can respond to them. This was provided 21/10 and no response yet again.

I’m due to start the job on Monday and have just been told today that they haven’t had a reply. I’ve rung and emailed again but now with phone calls they refuse to put you through to HR at all. Receptionist gave me another email which bounced back, I rang again to check and it is apparently correct.

I’m getting so upset about the lack of response and if this costs me the job I feel like I would want to write a complaint letter to the HR Director (I won’t as it won’t help!), but I think this is shitty. They’ve clearly found records for me because they want a consent form to release info. I’ve scoured online and I can’t find any names or direct emails/phone numbers for anyone in HR, and I don’t know anyone working there anymore to try and get a name.

I’m at a loss at what to do now. The new employer has two references already - a character ref and one from my voluntary role. Any previous employers were prior to 2004!

@Dreamerinme nightmare
Did you try the "conditional" start idea?

Any old payslips , tax records from.hmrc etc may help prove you did work there. Me and many friends have had the same issues with companies we left only a few years ago and it is stressful. No one seems to be filing anything properly anymore. I lost out on a job because a company took forever to find the record which they did in the end but was too late. Just had another who couldn't find ny employment record but luckily I found my tax records PAYE as they've not even been deleted yet or moved onto another database.
Hope you got it on the end .