Background: Recently laid off from current job; fortunately have plenty of great references from my current place, but am on the job hunt now.
I've come across a couple applications that have a format like this under their "Employment History" section:
Company phone: _______
Direct supervisor name: _______
Ok to contact? [Yes/No]
Does this mean they intend to contact my direct supervisor at my previous jobs (e.g. for a reference), or just check that I was actually employed at those places/times? (If there's an obvious answer.)
To me, the format makes it a bit confusing: the "company phone" part sort of makes it sound like the latter (to me, at least), where they might just contact an administrative person to check that I was an employee. However, putting the "ok to contact" field right after the "direct supervisor name" one sort of makes it sound like they might be looking to contact the actual supervisors.
I've reached out to one former supervisor, just in case, who thought it was kind of weird to need references from so many years past (though they still kindly offered to give a reference anyway).
I've had good relationships with all my former supervisors, so recommendations would probably not be a problem, I'm mostly just curious if there's some "common knowledge" here that I'm missing, and whether I'm generally going about this the right way. (My instinct is to contact my old supervisors for references anyway, just in case.)
Anyway, hopefully all that made sense, and that this hasn't been answered already (tried searching a bit and didn't find anything, but not sure if I just haven't thought of the right keywords or something).