Improving Hiring Decisions: Experimental Evidence on the Value of Reference Information About Teacher Applicants – Dan Goldhaber
Posted: 3/26/2026 (CSDE Seminar Series)
To Join By Zoom: Register HERE
We look forward to welcoming Dr. Dan Goldhaber from the University of Washington on Friday, April 3rd, in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative.
Professional references are widely used in hiring decisions, yet their effectiveness remains largely understudied. We analyze structured ratings collected from the professional references of teacher applicants and conduct an experiment to see whether the ratings influence hiring managers’ assessments of applicants and hiring decisions. We find little evidence that providing reference ratings to hiring managers influences their evaluations of candidates or hiring choices in productive ways. Importantly, we also find that reference ratings are predictive of future job performance. The result is a paradox: reference ratings offer potentially low-cost, high-value information, but hiring managers do not appear to make productive use of them.
Dr. Dan Goldhaber is the Director of the Center for Education Data & Research (CEDR, cedr.us) at the University of Washington and the Director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER, caldercenter.org) at the American Institutes for Research. Both CEDR and CALDER use administrative data to do research that informs decisions about policy and practice.
Date: 04/03/2026
Time: 12:30 - 1:30 PM
Location: Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom