I hate the whole concept of references. I don’t want to ask a favor from someone in my past. I don’t want to keep contact info for former bosses or co-workers.
Our society is like:
Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.
Have personal responsibility.
Your success or your failure is 100% due to your good or poor choices.
Employers: “By the way, you are going to need help from some strangers in your past in order to get a job with our company.”
Companies are constantly trying to figure out how to pay workers less. I would absolutely take less money if the hiring process didn’t have so much hoop-jumping. How has capitalism not figured that one out yet?
You have to have someone that will say good things about you. Not everyone necessary has that if their a dick. Most of the time they are looking for a job based reference as that’s more relevant to them, especially if the reference has a public phone number or company email etc.
You should only need two references most of the time, so it should be doable with just references from your previous company? Or maybe the one before that in a short stint.