Employers are obliged to provide a certificate of service on request.
What is an employee Certificate of Service and when would you issue one? In the case of employment, a Certificate of Service is what you MUST provide an employee to certify that they have been employed by your business. This is often an important step in the reference checking https://hrdocs.co.nz/?s=reference+checking process for new prospective employers.
For an employee, the Certificate of Service is a valuable and meaningful document in applying for future positions – which may be years from the time at which they depart from your business, possibly well after you have sold your business, perhaps retired or maybe moved to a new country.
An employee holding a Certificate of Service can confidently present their career in completely accurate time frames.
Importantly, the Certificate of Service does not make any statement about how their role was performed. While it may or may not point to promotions, certifications or qualifications achieved while in your employment relevant to the role – or even changes of position within the same company, it makes no assessment of the person’s ability.
A certificate of service is not the same as a reference!
The Certificate of Service is a very tidy method of delivering an employee for whom you are not comfortable recommending to another employer – or for someone who was always intending to be short term or filling a seasonal role of some sort.
On the flip side of this, if a potential candidate interviewing for a job with your company presents you with a Certificate of Service rather than a referee, it is not necessarily a flag of a poor reference. It is merely a certification of the period of time served in a business.
It does happen that employees choose not to have previous employers as referees, and that is fine – presuming they are able to provide current relevant referees on your request.
So, when it’s time to end employment with an employee – for whatever reason – yours or theirs, you should definitely conduct an exit interview – or have someone conduct it for you and you should definitely provide a Certificate of Service for the employee in their exit kit.
All forms and processes required for ending employment are in this section. You will find that using these forms will provide you with a complete and thorough professional record of all processes required.