By Chelsea Babin

Although the practice of asking for job references has almost gone the way of the Dodo, there are still a few companies that ask for and call references for their potential employees. If you’re gathering references and want to reach out to a distant professional contact whose title and time spent with you make them a good candidate for a job reference, follow these 6 steps.

1. Acknowledge that it’s Been a While: If you reach out to someone who you haven’t spoken to in a while, it’s strange if you don’t acknowledge how much time has passed. While you don’t need to apologize excessively for the absence, you should acknowledge that a lot of time has passed. After all, it’s an elephant in the room! Once that’s out of the way you can get onto the meat of your message.

2. Explain How Much of Their Time This Will Take: Because you haven’t kept in regular contact with this person, they’ll be wondering up front how much of their time is required to fulfill this expectation. When you don’t give time estimates, your distant professional contact may be reticent to agree or may simply not respond at all. If you’re applying to multiple jobs that ask for references, they’ll probably be expected to hop on several 10-minute reference phone calls. If it’s just for one company, it should take up no more than 15 minutes of their time.

3. Show Your Motives: Maybe you want to check in on their life or their family but doing this in the same email or phone call where you’re asking them to act as a reference for you isn’t the best idea. Get straight to the point, show your motives early, and save the catching up for after they agree or turn you down.

4. Remind Them of Your Qualifications or Accomplishments: If you haven’t been in touch for a while there’s a chance this professional contact may not remember all of the value you brought to a company, all of the qualifications you have, or all of your accomplishments that they were around for. Briefly refresh their memory so they can refer to this information and add on whatever else they’d like.

5. Let Them Know When You’re Interviewing: Along with time expectations you should give your potential reference a general time frame when an employer might be calling them. And if you use them as a professional reference in the future, make sure to let them know you’re interviewing and they may be called again. This will also give them the opportunity to back out if they’ll be out of town or too busy to fulfill this role and you can move on to the next person on your potential professional references list.

6. Don’t Forget to Say Thanks: It may not seem like you’re asking for much but, particularly when you haven’t kept in great contact with this person, you’re still asking for a favor and you should thank the person for their time whether they agree to be your reference or not.

You may never need professional references but, in case you do, this handy guide will help you reach out to former coworkers or bosses who you may have lost touch with and ask them to fulfill that role. Good luck!