A neighbor's recommendation vs a license check

This is not a competition, and any site that tells you a database beats a person you trust is selling you the database. A recommendation and a state record answer different questions. Notice that the agencies which run the registers say so themselves: California's CSLB, in the same post-disaster guide where it tells you to check the license, also tells you to ask friends, family, and associates for recommendations about contractors they have hired.

What a recommendation is good at

Whether they turned up when they said they would.
Whether the final invoice matched the quote.
Whether they cleaned up, explained things, came back to fix a snag.
Whether your neighbor would use them again, which is the compressed version of all of it.

None of that appears in any state file, anywhere. It is the half of the decision the register cannot reach.

What a recommendation cannot be

A sample. It is one job, one scope, one crew, one moment.
Current. Credentials lapse, staff change, companies are sold.
Transferable across trades. A great bathroom says nothing about a re-roof.
Evidence of insurance, which nobody asks a friend about.

What the register is good at, and blind to

A license lookup answers one question well: does the state currently authorize this business, or this person, to do this kind of work. In some states it answers a second: is there money behind them. Oregon's CCB lists what a licensed contractor brings that an unlicensed one does not - liability insurance covering damage to your property, workers' compensation cover where there are employees, a bond available to a customer who suffers damage from poor workmanship, access to board mediation in a dispute, and a track record you can check. Against an unlicensed contractor it lists the mirror image, including no source (bond) to reimburse you for poor workmanship and cannot pull required building permits.

What it is blind to is everything in the left-hand box above. A current license is not a prediction about workmanship, and no page on this site claims otherwise.

The two failure modes are symmetrical. Hiring on a recommendation alone means you never find out about the credential until something goes wrong. Hiring on a credential alone means you hired a legally authorized stranger. Do both, and do them in the order below.

The order that uses both properly

Collect names from people who have actually paid this trade. Specify the trade and the scope when you ask. "Who did your roof" is a better question than "who do you use".
Treat online reviews as one input, not the input. Oregon's CCB puts it carefully: check out online reviews, but don't consider them as sufficient information, and it is specifically wary of contractors found through classified listings.
Run every name through the state register before you meet anyone. It is free, and the license number is all it needs. How to verify a contractor's license covers all ten states we publish.
Ask for the certificate of insurance. Five of our ten states publish no insurance in the license file at all, so this is a question you put to the company: how to check a contractor's insurance.
Then ask your neighbor the questions the register cannot answer. Timekeeping, communication, the final bill, snagging.
Get the scope in writing before money moves. Washington L&I's summary applies whatever the source of the name: as tempting as it is to go with the first - or the cheapest - contractor, it is crucial to check their background before you hire.

Why there are no star ratings on this site

Because we did not collect them. We publish what the state actually verifies - licenses, insurance, bonds - and not star ratings gathered by somebody else and reprinted here. Stars tell you who charms reviewers; the register tells you who is allowed to do the work. Check both. Ours is the half nobody else shows you, and the recommendation from your street is a half we cannot supply.

That is a deliberate position rather than an omission, and it follows the same rule as everything else here: we do not display a number we cannot stand behind. How we verify and rank sets out what we do display, and where each field comes from.