Join the networkStart a conversation
All resources

For founders and hiring executives

Engineering Leadership Reference Guide

The reference conversation most companies run badly, rewritten to actually produce information.

Author
Terra Talent
Status
In production
Access
Free, email required
Flowering branches in a stone vessel against a pale plaster wall.

Who it is for

  • Founders taking references on a first engineering leader
  • Hiring executives who keep getting references that tell them nothing
  • Talent teams standardising how references are run and recorded

The problem it solves

Most reference calls are a formality run at the end of a process, with the candidate supplying the names and the questions inviting a positive answer.

A reference conversation designed properly is one of the highest-signal parts of a search, particularly for leadership hires where the failure modes are behavioural rather than technical.

What is inside

  1. 01Who to speak with, including how to source off-list references without damaging the candidate
  2. 02How to frame the call so the reference is willing to be candid
  3. 03Environment-specific questions: early stage versus scale, hardware versus software
  4. 04Management questions that surface how someone actually leads
  5. 05Technical depth questions for non-technical interviewers
  6. 06What to listen for, including reading what a reference declines to say
  7. 07A reference synthesis scorecard

The other two guides