Be careful what you do. Bad references can land you or your company in court, which will cost you money. What you can do is call the new employer and tell them that you wish to retract the reference you gave. Without any reasons. No matter how much they ask, no reasons given.
(Although there was ...
You are not the first advising to retract the reference without naming a reason. But I feel when not giving a reason, the issue may appear bigger than it really is. People's imagination tends to fill up the void, and there's a good chance they fill it up with something bigger than it actually is. Why couldn't OP say: 'there was a "small prank" costing us a few hours extra work'? Maybe when the issue is small, it helps being more explicit, and leaving less for the imagination?
Would this really land the company in court when OP isn't speaking on behalf of the company? They aren't a manager or anyone with authority over their co-worker.
Doubtful this would even make it to court. OP isn't someone in position of power over the prankster so how could the company be held liable for what the prankster does at some other company?
@Levente: It's a prank if everybody laughs about it. This wasn't a prank. This is just not done. If I retract my reference, nobody laughs either. It's not a prank. It's serious.
@gnasher729 Then again, I feel that way about most pranks... I was particularly not amused by most of "America's Funniest Home Videos" growing up, where the "best" videos (according to the producers, apparently) featured people hurting themselves.
I think the risk to OP as an individual is overstated. As far as I can google, a defamation lawsuit is the risk (in the US). The standards for that seem fairly high. As long as they only relay facts that they themselves believe to be true, they're legally fine. IANAL though.
@DavidSchwartz "It is not illegal to share negative opinions." — when doing so as a referrer, depending on which country you are in (e.g. in those where issuing a parting reference letter is mandatory) just throwing bad opinions around is not allowed. Facts, as long as they are relevant and important, are o.k. opinions, less so.
@Levente When asked for a reference, you are supposed to share your opinion of the person. If a law prevented you from sharing your honest opinions of a person as an employee, it would make references pointless.
@DavidSchwartz: For some countries (e.g. Austria), this is simply not true. You can be sued for damages when providing correct facts as a reference if they hinder the (former) employee's career. Yes, it's absurd. And yes, it makes reference letters mostly pointless.
@Heinzi If the OP is in such a country, then my advice to them would have been to refuse to provide a reference on the grounds that one cannot provide an accurate one. If you agreed to provide a reference, you should provide one.
@Levente: It is not anyone's responsibility to counteract or somehow steer someone else's imagination. Whatever the person infers from the retraction is that person's call, not OP's. The issue with the OP providing more concrete information is that they are now on the hook for the information they provided and its accuracy. A slip of the tongue can be costly. Even if OP says nothing wrong and the person only infers something that puts the applicant in a bad light, because OP gave details, it is more assumed that he conveyed the bad light instead of it having been blindly inferred.
@DavidSchwartz and gnasher279: it's illigal to give a negative reference in The Netherlands. Thought I'd put in the 2 cents as both question and answer don't have a location tag.
@DavidSchwartz What makes you think a crime has to be committed for someone to file a lawsuit? Someone could sue you for wearing purple socks if they wanted to. Whether the suit will succeed is irrelevant, if it costs the company money to defend against it, it's a liability.
@barbecue "You can be sued for anything" is a common retort. But absurd lawsuits will usually be thrown out by the court immediately, before you've had to spend much money defending yourself.
I don't really understand this answer. Suppose the coworker had pulled the prank before the prospective employer called for the reference. Would he risk trouble if he mentioned the prank during the call? If not, then what's the difference? If so, does that mean that when called for a reference you must either provide positive information or "no comment", never anything negative?
@Barmar it depends on the location, but yes, giving a negative reference can be anywhere from sightly risky to outright illegal, even if everything you say is completely true.
There's a distinction between the employer giving out a reference and an individual. Most of countries mentioned as being more restrictive with references, seem to apply those restrictions to employers. I don't see any mention of restrictions for individuals giving references. To be clear, I'm talking about Australia, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands and the UK.
@Levente, a "small prank" is... actually, I can't think of such a thing as a business-appropriate small prank. This is a firing offense. Thus, it is certainly grounds to withdraw any recommendation.
I would most certainly fire anyone who did such a thing on my staff. Thus, I could not in good conscience give a recommendation for anyone who behaved likewise. I don't understand how there is even such a conceptual thing as a "small prank" appropriate in business.
@CharlesDuffy Admittedly, my personal concept of the "small prank" had evolved throughout the progression of this thread. The idea about the prankster not even being in control of the impact of their actions (as described in the last paragraph) had arisen only halfway in.
Incidentally, the closest thing to a prank I think I've done over my career was printing out xkcd.com/114 and leaving it on the door of the head of the computational linguistics department of a small startup I was in at the time. It was, thankfully, accepted in good humor; but if she had interpreted this as an atmosphere of hostility and quit, the harm to the company would have been substantial; looking back, I can't even condone my much younger past-self's behavior.
ha, I have not realized who's answer this chatroom belongs to. I assumed — falsely — that it belonged to mine. That mention of a "last paragraph" in my above message was intended as the last paragraph of my own answer to this question.
@CharlesDuffy that XKCD anecdote illustrates the point I make when I say: pranksters rely on luck in avoiding/preventing collateral damage.
Discussion on answer by gnasher729: F…
Discussion on answer by gnasher729: F…