Verified Work Ledger

Mission Alignment

Employers face negligent-hiring liability if they fail to investigate a candidate thoroughly, and defamation liability if they share anything evaluative about a former employee — a bind that has made most reference checks yield nothing beyond dates and title. Meanwhile 87% of the discrepancies background checks actually find relate to employment and education verification specifically — exactly the category the reference check is supposed to catch and mostly doesn't, because the other side of the exchange has been legally silenced. This solution works entirely within that legal reality rather than fighting it: attest only to the narrow category of fact employers can already safely share.

Problem Statement

Candidates researching an employer have real infrastructure to work with — Glassdoor alone hosts tens of millions of reviews of pay, culture, and interview process. Employers researching a candidate have nothing close to an equivalent, and the gap isn't for lack of demand: it's the specific legal bind described above. That leaves employers making decisions on uncorroborated self-report at the exact moment self-report is least reliable — seventy percent of workers admit to having lied on a resume at least once, and 53% of submitted applications contain at least one inaccuracy — while legitimate candidates with real employment gaps or non-traditional histories get penalized by the same uncertainty that lets fraudulent claims pass unchecked, because there's no cheap, trusted way to tell the two apart.

Prior Research Findings

• Glassdoor hosts more than 70 million reviews and draws over 100 million visitors a month, with roughly 80% of the Fortune 500 covered — real, large-scale, free candidate-side infrastructure for verifying an employer. No employer-side equivalent exists for verifying a candidate, which is the asymmetry this solution exists to narrow (see Screening & Exclusion for the full reference-check-paradox explanation of why).
• 87% of discrepancies found by background checks relate specifically to employment and education verification — the exact category reference checks are supposed to catch and mostly don't, because employer counsel routinely advises sharing only dates and title, nothing evaluative (SHRM; WorkReferences).
• Rewriting a resume to list years-worked totals instead of exact employment dates increased callbacks by about 8% for candidates without gaps and about 15% for candidates with gaps — a tested, working intervention this solution builds directly into its candidate-facing format (IZA Discussion Paper No. 18292).
• Gartner projects 1 in 4 candidate profiles globally will be fake by 2026, and advises clients hiring for remote IT roles to assume at least half of applications are false — the fraud problem this solution is designed to reduce without requiring employers to take on new legal risk.

Scope Boundary

In Scope

• Employer- or payroll-system-signed attestations limited to dates of employment and job title — the exact category current law already lets employers share safely
• A candidate-controlled wallet for selectively sharing attested records with prospective employers
• A years-worked display format matching the tested callback-boosting intervention, rather than exact start/end dates

Out of Scope

• Any evaluative or performance-related content — the category defamation liability makes untenable to collect at all, not just difficult
• Replacing criminal background checks or licensing verification, which are separate, already-regulated processes

Product Components

Attestation Protocol

• Employer- or payroll-provider-signed records limited strictly to dates and title, opt-in for the issuing employer
• Cryptographic signing so a record's authenticity can be verified without contacting the original employer directly

Candidate Wallet

• Candidate holds and controls their own attested history, choosing what to share and with whom
• Default display uses years-worked totals rather than exact dates, matching the format shown to reduce gap-related callback penalties

Fraud Signal Layer

• Flags claims that cannot be attested at all, rather than treating unattested and attested claims identically — surfacing risk without requiring any new evaluative disclosure from employers

Phased Milestones

1. MVP: single-employer pilot issuing signed dates/title attestations
2. V1: candidate wallet with selective sharing, integrated with 2–3 ATS platforms
3. V2: payroll-provider integration for low-friction, automatic attestation issuance at the point of employment separation
4. V3: adoption broad enough that the absence of an attested record becomes itself a visible, informative signal

Open Research Questions

• Can attestation adoption reach critical mass voluntarily, given the same free-rider dynamic that stalls employer-funded training coordination elsewhere in this system — or does it require a regulatory nudge?
• Would a narrow reference-check safe-harbor law change employer willingness to attest to more than dates and title, and is that worth pursuing alongside this product rather than instead of it?

Success Metrics

• A measurable reduction in background-check turnaround delays attributable to employer non-responsiveness
• A measurable reduction in the employment-gap callback penalty for candidates using the years-worked-format wallet record, tracked against the existing 8%/15% baseline