Carrie Phoned an Applicant's Former Supervisor for a Reference

question 3

Multiple Choice

Carrie phoned an applicant's former supervisor for a reference. The supervisor refuses to give any information about the former employee. What mistake may Carrie have made?

• A) She did not get a signed consent form from the applicant releasing the former supervisor from liability.
• B) She limited her request for information to dates of employment, positions held, and the applicant's previous job title rather than asking for particular examples of good or poor performance.
• C) She contacted the supervisor by phone rather than in writing or via email, thus opening the supervisor to a charge of slander by the applicant.
• D) Former supervisors rarely provide useful information, so it is not an effective use of Carrie's time to pursue this contact.

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Definitions:

Sample Size

The number of observations or data points collected in a study or used in a statistical sample.

Standard Error

A statistical measure of the precision for a series of measurements or the estimate of the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of a statistic.

Population Standard Deviation

A measure of the dispersion or variance in a population dataset, indicating how spread out the data points are from the population mean.

Sample Size

The number of observations or units included in a sample taken from a population for the purpose of statistical analysis.