Most of us spend days preparing for job interviews — researching companies, perfecting resumes, nailing down our elevator speeches, even picking the perfect outfit. Yet many of us fail to devote the same attention to preparing our references. Bad references can instantly kill a job prospect, so they need to be treated as more than just an afterthought.

Here are some of the common land mines people trip on when they haven’t taken the time to prepare their references.

— Compiled by Winter, Wyman, a Waltham-based staffing firm