Why would an employer provide a bad job reference letter ("Arbeitszeugnis")?

I want to give a bit of a tangential answer as to why a company would give a bad reference.

It comes back to the notion of Good Faith.

Assume for the moment I am a business owner. For my Business, unless I am a revolutionary startup - the chances are I am going to be in a market with other competitors. Furthermore, the likelihood that I will deal with those competitors, both collaboratively and competitively is very high.

In NZ, in IT - we have a bit of a phrase: Kiwi IT is Incestuous. Meaning that the pool of workers is so small that you will end-up working with someone you have worked with before.

This means if I have an objectively bad employee and I palm them off to a company that is either a competitor or within the industry I work in, with a glowing review - word will get around, people will question my judgement and my capability. People will start not wanting to deal with me fairly.

Therefore, whilst it may be advantageous in the short term to get rid of a bad employee, in the long term it can be very harmful.

Honesty and integrity form key aspects of a High-trust society, which we operate in. I want to be dealt with fairly in my future dealings - doesn't mean I will always get what I want - but so long as it is fair - I can live with that. If I start lying and cheating - people will very quickly catch on and I will face the repurcussions.

But we have to be clear here - to get a bad review is very difficult. It generally means Instant dismissal for Gross Misconduct. I have worked with some people that if I had the means - I would never hire again.

I am not going to put in the referall that they were useless. I would put that our office culture was not the right fit for them or similar.

Because this is another thing to consider - Person A at Employer A might be useless, Person A at Employer B might be great.

what is the benefit for a company to give a reference letter that does not describe the person as a model employee?

Professional courtesy and reciprocity.

Most managers read more references than they write. References are an important part of the hiring process and if you want to read honest ones and actually get some useful information, you should be willing to write honest ones and provide useful information as well. Otherwise the whole system becomes useless.

In any country, an employer should be truthful about the employee's stint with them. They could be called by a prospective employer and they need to justify their reference. In some countries they could also be sued for for providing incorrect information.

In New Zealand, the laws are stupid, where the employer is not allowed to say anything bad in a reference. So -

• The honest employers word it carefully with fluff. That is, what is important is left out.
• The dishonest ones lie. An example is the medical profession. The hospitals lie to get rid of the bad doctors. There have been cases of these doctors being so bad as to have allegedly caused death.

I am in the honest camp. But for bad employees, I praise everything except their work. I have had a case where the new employer rang up and quizzed me about it. I fielded that. Then he was persistent about "if I would employ him again" and "why did I let him go". At that point I could not avoid the truth.

The employee has already quit; so why would the company want to make life hard for them?

And why would they go out of their way to help them?

If they were a sub-par employee, it's easiest - and honest - to just state they were a sub-par employee without inventing qualities for the sake of helping someone who wasn't as helpful as they should have been and has already left.

In an ideal world, your employer would wish you well on your further career path and let you go. In a not-so-ideal real world, they may have hard feelings toward you.

Giving out bad references could be done out of spite, or because they feel obligated to "warn" next employers about a "bad" candidate. Especially in small companies, there may be personal feelings involved.

Or they hope that you'll come back, if your next gig doesn't work out. But all that is just speculation. Companies are run by people, and people tend to react irrational all the time.

In germany, there are laws that prohibit companies to give out bad reviews. Because of that german HR departements have developed a whole art form of giving out reviews who sound nice, but are anything but.

If you ask me, why bother with references at all, if they won't be honest, or just contain secret HR talk no one understands? Until now I have never requested them from past employers. If some agency or a future employer needs something to verify that I worked at company XY, I always just asked for a confirmation of employment, not a written reference.

In the United Kingdom, references are normally personal, from an individual. I've never encountered an official reference from a company, although that doesn't prove they never happen.

Last year, I got an unexpected LinkedIn message from an ex-colleague who left some years ago for health reasons. So did his former supervisor; it seemed likely to both of us that the ex-colleague was now job-hunting and would ask for references. He's quite capable at some things and exceptionally bad at others, though he didn't understand this while working for us. I have a pre-written reference for him explaining this, and how to manage him.

If I'm asked for it, it may prevent him from getting the kind of job where he'd cause a disaster, and will hopefully help him get the kind of job he can succeed in. I wrote it to clarify my own reasoning, and in the hope of helping him, even it if doesn't match what he wants. Enabling him to cause havoc at another company would not help him at all.