As a person who has been hiring, firing, mentoring and generally driving techs crazy for too many years, I can give one fact and one strategy.

Fact: References are a burnt into 'Corporate Culture' and it ain't going away.

Strategy: Write your own reference template and ask former employers if they will read and sign. As an employer I like this as it saves me time. I often find with 'good' former employee's I edit UP reference that are to modest.

Outline your resposibilites and any projects you felt you excelled at and remember the Golden Rule of why Corporate USA hires someone . To either/and/or increase revenues, reduce costs, improve quality of product/service, create new product/service.

mitd-Made in the Dark
'Interactive! Paper tape is interactive!
If you don't believe me I can show you my paper cut scars!'

In reply to Re: At what stage in a job interview process should references come into play? by mitd
in thread At what stage in a job interview process should references come into play? by princepawn

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.