By ELIZABETH GARONE

Q: I’ve worked several jobs since separating from the Army. Some have been contracting positions, others as an exempt employee. Some have been with high-profile international companies. Not once have any of my previous employers or references been contacted. Do references really matter anymore? It seems to me they are even less important than cover letters and the objective statement in resumes.

A: You would be mistaken to think that references hold little weight, especially in the current depressed job market. “References absolutely matter,” says Paul W. Barada, president of Barada Associates Inc. The Rushville, Ind.,-based firm provides pre-employment screening services for large employers such as Emmis Communications Corp. and Acorda Therapeutics Inc.

Some people who are out of work embellish their past job performance, credentials and academic achievements to gain an edge over the competition, Mr. Barada says.

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With applicant pools growing larger by the day, it would be good to assume that employers will be diligently contacting references. “In my experience, references are always being checked,” says Dena Sneider, a career consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. “In this market, they will certainly be checked since employers have their pick of candidates.”

Remember, too, that just because you haven’t heard anything from a reference doesn’t mean that he or she hasn’t been contacted.

More than ever, it’s essential to choose those references who can best speak to your work abilities and past successes on the job. A problem that Mr. Barada frequently sees is job seekers who list references with whom they’ve never actually worked. “What, for instance, can your golfing buddy know about your management style or job responsibilities?”

It’s important to consider who would be an employer’s ideal set of references. Usually, this is a current or former supervisor, peer and subordinate whom you’ve worked with in the past five to seven years, according to Mr. Barada.

Another mistake job seekers often make is not checking in with their references each time they list them on an application. You don’t want a reference to be caught off guard when he or she receives that all-important call. If you are planning on listing someone, send an email thanking him or her for agreeing to serve as a reference and include a copy of the job description. It couldn’t hurt to refresh a reference’s memory by including a list of your responsibilities and achievements from when you worked together. By providing the necessary information, your references will be much more prepared to take a call and to impress a potential employer.

For Bob Daugherty, who heads U.S. recruiting for PricewaterhouseCoopers, the best references are ones from people who work for the organization you’re looking to join. “Resumes and letters are expected to be strong, and candidates should still have several strong references at the ready, but it is those networking relationships that truly matter the most in getting in the door.”

Mr. Daugherty offers hard evidence that relationships matter more than you might think. At PricewaterhouseCoopers, more than 40% of hires with experience (as opposed to those recruited directly from campus) come through employee referrals, he says. If you don’t already have connections at a firm you’re targeting, seek out references from people in your network.

Write to Elizabeth Garone at cjeditor@dowjones.com. If you have a question for the careers columnists, be sure to put Career Q&A in your subject line.

By JOE LIGHT

Printed on the front of Fabrice Tourre’s performance review was a message: “Not intended for disclosure outside the firm.” At Senate hearings last week he and a few other Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executives learned there was an exception: Congress.

As they grilled the executives about their roles in the financial crisis, senators quoted from the executives’ performance reviews, noting the self-congratulatory tone they regularly used.

“It should not be a surprise to anyone that the 2007 year is the one that I am most proud of to date,” Goldman managing director Michael Swenson wrote in his self-evaluation. The comments could be an argument for a bonus, but Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) used them to tie Goldman to trades that now have the bank in the hot seat.

Employees long ago learned to watch what they put in emails, which often are monitored, saved and used as evidence. But even human-resources professionals were surprised to learn that self-assessments aren’t really confidential, even beyond their use in wrongful-termination litigation. The revelation of what many considered confidential information could have a chilling effect on an evaluation tool that is ubiquitous in corporate America.

“It’s mind boggling,” says Fred Foulkes, a Boston University professor who specializes in human-resources issues. “No one could have expected that these would become public.”

Self-Promotion

Bankers’ self-assessments could be a rich source of fodder for a Congress keen to bring financial firms under scrutiny. To justify year-end bonuses and argue for promotions, investment bankers commonly brag about behavior that otherwise wouldn’t be made public.

“There are a lot of firms on the street where if you don’t beat your chest like Tarzan, it’s viewed as a sign of weakness,” says Nick Zarcone, a managing director and chief operating officer in Robert W. Baird & Co.’s investment-banking department.

Earlier in the decade, self-evaluations were used as evidence during investigations into the relationship between the research and investment-banking arms of Goldman Sachs and other firms. But, unlike the current hearings, in most of those cases, the names of the analysts were hidden.

Self-assessments can also become evidence in wrongful-termination cases; most people filing suit would expect that to be the case.

But, what many people may not know is that evaluations of co-workers of someone filing suit can be disclosed and used to help make a case, says Daniel O’Meara, an employment attorney for Montgomery McCracken in Philadelphia. Still, the names are rarely publicly disclosed, Mr. O’Meara says.

Chilling Effect

That’s what makes the Goldman case so surprising to human-resources experts. Self-evaluations are nearly ubiquitous at corporations and often are used as part of a “360-degree” review process, in which the employee is assessed by superiors, peers, and subordinates. Most human-resources departments allow only managers of an employee’s group to look them up, says Kim Ruyle, a vice president of HR consulting firm Korn/Ferry International.

Many employers keep them in their files for up to seven years, leaving them open to subpoena. After the publicity of the Goldman case, companies may think twice about keeping them around for so long, say employment experts.

And in the short term until the political pressure dies down, firms might be wary of creating reviews that could embarrass them later, said Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of Business.

“This can have a chilling effect on the whole process,” says Mr. Foulkes of Boston University.

By ARIEL LEVY

At 17, Anjelica Huston started her modeling career and became a muse to designers such as Halston and Zandra Rhodes, photographed by the likes of Richard Avedon, Guy Bourdin and Bob Richardson. At 60 she remains the best- and most interesting-looking person in the room: imposing, bewitching, singular.

Her striking appearance is, of course, only one element of Huston’s mystique. She is self-possessed, intense and forthcoming. You can feel a bit of her peculiar personal magnetism in roles as varied as Morticia Addams and the agonized mother and con artist Huston played in “The Grifters,” a part she took on at the end of her famous 16-year romance with Jack Nicholson. Even as the desperate mistress Martin Landau was trying to unload in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” Huston expressed a potent if unhinged power.

In recent years, she has collaborated with Wes Anderson, bringing a kind of backbone to whimsical movies like “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.” Every director she’s worked with has seemed like a bit of a breeze compared with one of her first, the legendary John Huston (who was shooting “The African Queen” when he received a telegram that his daughter had been born, on July 8, 1951). But then it was working with him, on “Prizzi’s Honor,” that won Huston her Academy Award.

“I love to look at young people, but there’s something about a little more experience and the way it reflects in a face that pulls me in more.”

Huston has been writing a memoir since her husband of 16 years, the artist Robert Graham, died in 2008. She seems to have a hard-won clarity about her life—her childhood in Ireland on her father’s 110-acre Galway estate, her youth in New York City’s glamorous ’70s fashion scene, her nearly two decades in Los Angeles with Nicholson, and her time with Graham, living in the house he built for them in Venice Beach, his most intimate work of art.

Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

THE EARLY DAYS | With her father, John Huston, in 1968, the year before their film “A Walk With Love and Death”

Huston has a farm near the Sequoia National Forest, where she keeps her beloved horses, pigs and sheep, and works on her book. But since last summer she has been in New York City, shooting the new NBC series “Smash,” in which she plays a producer whose state of mind Huston can understand: Her character is coping with the end of a marriage and fighting ferociously to advance her art.

I always knew I was talented. I always knew I had more than, initially, if I can be so blunt, I was appreciated for. That I had this thing that I had to get out—something that I had to push along.

I was always very sensitive about how things came to me; I see the sons and daughters of very famous people not really seemingly having that problem. I just worked with Meryl Streep’s daughter Gracie Gummer, who plays my daughter on “Smash.” She’s divine—like her mother. Lovely, sweet, free. Just the opposite of me at that age. I was full of complexes.

I did a movie called “A Walk With Love and Death” with my dad when I was 16. It was very difficult; he was very critical of me. When he did praise me it meant a lot, but it didn’t come easily to him. He was tough on himself, too. It was just part of his makeup—it wasn’t that he had it in for me or anything.

After that, I came to London and I was offered the chance to understudy Marianne Faithfull in Tony Richardson’s “Hamlet.” I was in rehearsal when Dick Avedon came to town. He was a good friend of my mother’s and father’s, and he asked them if he could photograph me. We did some test pictures, and the answer sort of came from him through my mother that he didn’t really think I’d be a model because my shoulders were too big. I was quite hurt by that, but anyway, onward. Shortly after, my mother was killed in a car crash and I didn’t want to stay on in London.

I went with “Hamlet” to New York. “Harper’s Bazaar” called and asked if I’d do a layout, and they sent a photographer called Bob Richardson to pick me up and take me out to Jones Beach to do some photographs. We had a kind of magical afternoon. I was a little girl, 17, when we met, and my mother had just died.

Bob was much older. He kind of took me over, hook, line and sinker. It wasn’t all bad: He was a fascinating person, a very extreme and radical person. When things were good, they were wonderful and beautiful, and when things were bad they were truly horrid. When you find yourself in that kind of pendulum swing, you’re kind of recovering half the time from the other half of the time. He was not a well person.

Diana Vreeland was at “Vogue,” and she was great. She was always on my side, a great ally. That’s how it really started out. I loved doing runway. I did quite a lot of that with great people like Halston and Zandra Rhodes and Perry Ellis. It was very inclusive—especially with Halston. We girls traveled in a pack, and we called ourselves the Halstonettes: Elsa Peretti, Pat Cleveland, Karen Bjornson. There was a good deal of amusement. Right before I quit, which was about 1973 or 1974, the best photographers were here in New York, the clothes were great, I was booked all the time. It was right before everything kind of imploded and cocaine and AIDS took over the entire scene.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

IN GOOD COMPANY | With boyfriend Jack Nicholson at the Academy Awards in 1975, where he was nominated for his role in “Chinatown”

I met Jack Nicholson, and I knew that I wasn’t going to work as a model in California the way I’d worked in New York. I wasn’t a California girl; I knew I would never sell toothpaste. But I was in love and I wanted to be with my new boyfriend. I didn’t want to be away from him…. I didn’t trust him that far, I think quite rightly! It was good times; he had a great life. We’d go to Aspen in the winter. I met wonderful artists, great filmmakers—Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, Hal Ashby, Faye Dunaway and Diane Keaton. All these really fabulous people.

Opportunities came up to test for things, mostly things that Jack was involved with and that always felt too much like a handout. I remember going to visit my dad in Mexico when I was 28 years old. I was still sort of teetering around this idea of being an actress; I’d done a part in “The Last Tycoon.” I told him that for real, I was really serious about it. He said, “Well, don’t you think you’re a little old, honey?”

I was shattered—shattered!—at the idea that maybe I’d missed out. I guess that’s pretty late, actually. I’ve been lucky, but for most people, after the age of 30, the curtain kind of comes down. For actresses, certainly. But I think people become more watchable after 30, when they have something on their face and something between their ears. I love to look at young people, but there’s something about a little experience and the way it reflects in a face that pulls me in more.

Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

BRIGHT EYES | Photographed by Eve Arnold in 1968 at St. Clerans, the estate in Galway, Ireland, where she grew up

I was doing “The Grifters” when Jack and I broke up. It was a big, long relationship, and even though it was an ending that had to happen, it was a very painful ending. At least for me. I felt very devalued at the time. I was, frankly, furious. You can’t really take it out in your everyday life; that’s one of the reasons acting is such a bonus for me. “The Grifters” had everything to do with everything I was feeling at the time—kind of having to cut off a part of myself to go on. I didn’t really know what was going to happen in my life.

A friend of mine called me up and said, “Would you like to come to dinner, and would you mind if I sent Bob Graham to pick you up?” I knew Bob’s work from the ’84 Olympics, when he’d made two massive pieces for the coliseum, and I loved those pieces. It was one of the first things we talked about. We were on the rooftop after dinner at my friend’s gallery, and there were fireworks going off, and I looked across the terrace and I thought, Huh, maybe. Maybe that’s what it’s going to be.

“I can’t really conceive of the fact that Bob’s no longer on the planet. It’s outlandish—particularly because he was such a present person.”

I was always very reluctant about marriage. Marriage always felt to me like a form of withdrawal or a form of throwing in the towel as a young woman. I got married in my 40th year. Suddenly it was possible and made sense, and I met someone whom I could imagine being serious about for a long time.

Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos

A modeling shot by Philippe Halsman from 1968

It wasn’t based on any of the things that had drawn me to boyfriend-girlfriend relationships in the first place. It comes as an immense shock every morning that he’s not there. It’s one of those things you have to kind of keep talking yourself into: I can’t really conceive of the fact that Bob’s no longer on the planet. It’s outlandish—particularly because he was such a present person, so full of character and humor, so very there.

I just came through a huge event in my life, the sickness and death of my husband. Right now New York’s a good place for me. I’m very happy to be in a show with singing and dancing—I love that it’s not forensics or cops or any of that culture-of-death stuff. It’s not a dowdy role. I get to crack my whip a little bit.

Photograph by Cedric Buchet; Styling by Tiina Laakkonen

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT | Huston channels Hollywood glamour as she moves into a new stage and a new city.

I like to be associated with strength rather than weakness and misery. But we’re made up of all of these components. There’s always a moment where you are deeply alone in your own skin, and it’s hard to come to terms with it. There’s a period after something like the death of a spouse where you can totally understand why widows wore veils.

Because no one should really look upon you for a couple of years, and you really shouldn’t look upon anyone else. You’re very tender; you feel like something uncooked. And people can be very unpleasant when you’re in a state of grief. I think in Bob’s case, some of the people who cared about him the most needed someone to blame.

I have to move along. Our house is for sale now. I love L.A., but I don’t know if it’s going to be my home anymore. I’m at this strange time in my life where maybe it’s time to totally uproot again.

—Edited from Ariel Levy’s interview with Anjelica Huston

Makeup: Pep Gay @ Streeters; Hair: Akki; Manicure: Alicia Torello at The Wall Group; Fashion Assistant: Britt Marie Kittelsen; Photo Assistants: Alexandre Salle De Chou, James Giles; Digital Tech: Ludovic Nicolas; Makeup Assistant: Sir John Barnett. Cartier earrings; David Webb ring; Manolo Blahnik shoes; Tom Ford tuxedo

On the cover: Makeup: Pep Gay @ Streeters; Hair: Akki; Manicurist: Alicia Torello @ The Wall Group; Jewelry: David Webb; Hat: Patricia Underwood; Blouse: Tom Ford