Could My Spouse Be A Reference In The Future?

A reader writes:

I’ve been unemployed for more than six months after a layoff, and I’m extremely discouraged. My industry is being cannibalized by AI, and my ambivalence about our robot overlords is one of many factors making it hard to find another role. My husband has been operating a very successful business in the trades for nearly 12 years, and he has been wanting to overhaul his admin setup for a while now, plus he has less and less bandwidth for organizational development, which is inhibiting the company’s growth.

He is strongly encouraging me to join the company in an office manager-esque capacity. He has written up a thorough job description that includes longer-term plans for me to develop my skills and take on a robust role as more of a business partner. We would have separate workspaces, I could relieve him from a lot of the overwhelm from tedious tasks like sending/following up on invoices, and I would have a lot of autonomy to manage his schedule (which would be a massive benefit to me on a personal level lol). I’m an excellent communicator, relationship builder, writer, and editor (and I’ve worked in an admin capacity for a large, complex organization), so my foundational skills would already be an asset for the business.

I won’t go through the rest of the long pros and cons list I’ve got through my head, but there is one significant challenge: what happens if I decide to leave (which my husband has been very clear would be fine with him)? He has only ever worked in the trades and has no understanding of white collar norms, and he insists that he could act as a reference without the potential employer knowing he is my spouse (which would be relatively easy to conceal — at least at first — because it’s a small business and he and I have different last names). I keep telling him that it would be a massive hit to my reputation if the employer ever found out that I had lied by omission, and anyway over the long term it would be difficult to never mention him or his business to my colleagues/boss. The larger point stands, though: if a future employer won’t give much credence to my husband’s opinion of my work, how could I leverage that experience for a future job?

Yeah, you couldn’t use him as a reference. Stick with your instinct on that — it would reflect badly on you if it came out that you’d offered your husband as a reference without disclosing that (and the chances of it coming out are high if you ended up taking the job).

But you could still talk about your accomplishments at that job on your resume and in your interviews. At the reference-checking stage, you’d just explain that it was a family business and you assume they don’t want to call your husband for a reference, but here are references from previous jobs who can talk about your skills and what you’re like to work with.

Jobs don’t lose all their value just because a reference for them isn’t available — otherwise people would be really screwed when references died! It just won’t help in that one specific way, but it can still help in lots of other ways so don’t make your decision based on this factor.

(That said, I’ll give you the same cautions I’d give anyone considering working with a spouse, which is that there are other drawbacks: an inability to escape work when you’re at home, the potential for tensions at work to bleed into your relationship and vice versa, potential weirdness or difficulties for other staff if there’s a problem with one of you that they have to talk to the other about, etc. None of those are reasons not to do it, but they’re all things you’d want to think about.)

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