When quitting a job you can ask for a work certificate/letter of recommendation. What are the customs for writing one? If a employee leaves from his own choice and hasn’t done anything bad isn’t he supposed to get the highest recommenditions?
I understand that excellent is the norm and if you are reviewed as a good employee there’s something wrong with you/the way you work.
Assuming you are in the United States (something tells me that may be a poor assumption - I’ve never heard of a work certificate) you are more than welcome to ask for a letter of recommendation upon leaving an employer. The employer, however, is under no obligation to provide one. As far as I am aware there is no standard for “coded” wording for a letter of recommendation where “excellent” means “good”, “good” means “don’t hire this creep”, etc. I have read and written many recommendations in the past and the styles vary as much as the authors.
In today’s litigation scared environment, though, most larger companies have adopted a policy of not providing letters of recommendation at all but instead supply only the timespan of employment and salary history.
I’ve never been asked for a letter of recommendation, nor have any of my references ever been checked, to my knowledge, with one exception.
It’s still the norm for people to provide letters of recommendation from colleagues in the case of academic positions. And, yes, the rule is that you are either lauded to the skies as a genius, or the suspicion is that there is something wrong with you.
More often now, in the US anyway, a prospective employer won’t even bother to ask. A recommendation will be either a glowing, useless whitewash, whose lines cannot be reliably read between, or the request will be refused altogether on the basis of policy. I’ve seen news stories about people suing former employers and winning over recommendations that weren’t glowing, on the basis that they were preventing the person from getting a new job.
I’ve heard the same thing as ElvisL1ves. My company has a reference-writing service, which only confirms that you were employed by them during the dates specified. Nothing else; they’re too worried about being sued by other employers over misleading references.
Reference letter are pretty much dead in ‘major’ companies, not worth the paper they’re written on. The graduate HR manager for a large British (and multinational) financial services company I worked for said, basically, that they assume anything like that is forged and rely entirely on very thorough interview processes and ‘fact’ checks (e.g. checking you didn’t lie about academic awards).
The only references that seem popular are ‘live’ personal ones – almost exclusively by phone. I’ve been asked to provide reception details for an employer to contact the referee via the switchboard, to help ensure it’s not a mate putting it all on. I suppose it’s no surprise, given the increasingly litigious nature of life.