A recruiter reaches out to you on LinkedIn for a role you never applied to, at a company you’ve never spoken with. You didn’t send them anything. You didn’t ask to be found. And yet here they are, in your inbox, clearly convinced you’re a fit.
That’s happened to me more than once - pulled in purely on the strength of skills and endorsements sitting on my profile. It’s a small, easy-to-miss data point, but it tells you something important: even a system as flimsy as LinkedIn’s skill endorsements, where anyone can vouch for anyone with a single click, is already good enough to change what recruiters do. It already moves real decisions.
Which raises an obvious question. If an unverified, gameable signal is doing that much work - what happens when the signal is actually true?
The verification LinkedIn already does and where it stops
LinkedIn has spent the last few years quietly building real verification infrastructure. You can confirm you’re a real person by submitting a government ID through a partner like CLEAR or Persona. You can confirm you currently work somewhere by verifying a company email address. More than 100 million members have added at least one of these verifications, and LinkedIn has extended the same trust signals to job postings and company pages.
That’s a meaningful foundation. But look closely at what it actually proves: you exist, and you currently have an email address at Company X. That’s it. It says nothing about whether the ten years of job titles above that current role are real. It says nothing about whether the certification listed under your name was ever issued, whether the patent you claim was ever filed, or whether the people who managed you would say you were any good.
LinkedIn verifies identity. It doesn’t verify careers. And for a platform whose entire value proposition is “this is where your career lives,” that’s a strange place to stop.
What a real verification layer would look like
Here’s the proposal, in concrete terms - not “wouldn’t it be nice,” but an actual mechanism.
Certifications and badges don’t need to be invented from scratch. Digital credentialing infrastructure already exists - platforms like Credly, and the growing number of institutions and companies issuing their own verifiable digital badges. LinkedIn wouldn’t need to build a new credentialing standard; it would need to plug into the ones that already exist and are already digitized.
Employment history and peer endorsement is the harder problem, and it’s where the current system’s biggest weakness - and the fix - both live. LinkedIn already tried structured endorsements once, in the form of skill endorsements, and they became noise: anyone can endorse anyone for anything, with zero cost and zero accountability. The fix isn’t to remove endorsements. It’s to gate them.
Picture this: you worked at Company A for three years, then moved to Company B. Under a real verification layer, the only people eligible to endorse your time at Company A are people who were themselves verified employees of Company A, during the same window you were there - verified the same way LinkedIn already verifies current employment, through a company email address. Not “anyone who knows you.” Not “anyone who clicks a button.” Only people who can prove they were actually in the building with you, at the time.
That single design choice turns endorsements from a popularity contest into something closer to a reference check that happens to be structured, searchable, and built into the platform you’re already on.
Patents and published research are, if anything, the easiest piece - they already sit in searchable public databases at patent offices and journals. The hard part was never finding them. It was connecting them to a person’s profile in a way anyone could trust.
Consent governs all of it. This isn’t an always-on data pipe the way a traditional background-check vendor works, where a company pulls your records once you’ve signed a blanket consent form. It’s opt-in and event-triggered: when you move to a new company and that company kicks off a verification process, you switch on data-sharing for that event. Nothing is exposed by default, and nothing is exposed continuously. You control when the API can see anything at all.
And LinkedIn’s incentive to build this isn’t goodwill - it’s revenue. A cut of transaction value, or a flat fee per verification, turned into a licensable API that companies could use instead of, or alongside, traditional background-check vendors. This isn’t a feature. It’s a product line.
Why now, and not five years ago
This idea isn’t new to me, and it isn’t new to this post. I pitched an early version of it internally at Microsoft during a 2023 hackathon. I reached out to LinkedIn’s leadership directly, laying the idea out. I never heard back from either.
At the time, I don’t think the pitch was wrong so much as early. A huge amount of what makes this feasible - employment records, certifications, government-issued documents - depends on those records existing in digitized, cross-referenceable form somewhere. In 2023, that infrastructure was patchy. It isn’t anymore. Governments at national and local levels have spent the last few years aggressively rolling out digital records for nearly everything. The raw material this proposal depends on now exists in a way it simply didn’t a few years ago.
The market has also caught up to the urgency of the problem. Multiple industry analysts now project that a striking share of job applicants worldwide - some estimates put it near one in four by 2028 - could be entirely or partially fraudulent, driven in large part by how easy AI has made it to generate a convincing resume, or an entire convincing profile, out of nothing. Recent employer surveys back this up from the other direction: the overwhelming majority of companies now run some form of background check before hiring, and a meaningful share of them have had to walk back a job offer after discovering the candidate’s resume didn’t hold up. And this isn’t an abstract, far-off risk - it’s already visible in ordinary reporting out of markets like the U.S. and India, where stories of people running multiple LinkedIn profiles with slightly altered details, purely to game recruiters and hiring processes, are common enough to be unremarkable.
Employers already spend billions of dollars a year trying to solve this problem after the fact, through background-check vendors who verify records that a platform like LinkedIn is, in theory, better positioned to verify at the source.
The part almost nobody’s proposal covers: freelancers
Every version of this idea I’ve seen - and every version I’ve pitched before this one - stops at corporate employees. That’s a mistake, and it’s the part of this proposal I care about most.
A corporate employee has an HR department quietly vouching for them by the simple fact of a paycheck and a company email address. A freelancer or gig worker has none of that. They might do excellent work for a dozen clients and have almost nothing to show for it beyond scattered testimonials, screenshots, and word of mouth. There’s no equivalent of a company email address proving they did the work, and did it well.
Platforms like Topmate already let independent professionals collect structured client feedback. Imagine that feedback flowing directly into the same verified-credibility layer described above - not as a review buried on a third-party site, but as a structured, verified credential sitting on the same profile a recruiter or client already checks. A freelancer builds a track record the same way a corporate employee builds a resume, except the record is portable, verifiable, and theirs, not locked inside whichever platform happened to host the gig.
That’s the piece that turns this from “LinkedIn adds a better background check” into something closer to trust infrastructure for the entire working world - corporate and independent alike.
The obvious objections, answered
“Endorsements already failed once - why would this be different?” Because the failure mode was specific: zero-cost, unverifiable, one-click endorsements from anyone. Gate endorsements behind verified shared employment, and the entire failure mode disappears. It stops being a popularity contest and starts being closer to a structured reference check.
“This creates a much bigger privacy problem.” It’s a legitimate concern, and it deserves a firm answer, not a hand-wave: LinkedIn would need to comply with local data regulations in every market it operates in, without exception. Paired with opt-in, per-event consent - nothing shared by default, nothing shared continuously - this is actually a more privacy-respecting model than how most background-check flows work today, where broad consent is granted once and records get pulled indefinitely afterward.
“Why would LinkedIn bother? What’s in it for them?” A monetizable API, licensed to companies who currently pay third-party background-check vendors for information LinkedIn is structurally better positioned to verify at the source. This isn’t a trust-and-safety cost center. It’s a new product line sitting on top of infrastructure LinkedIn has already built most of.
“Won’t incumbents like Checkr and HireRight just compete this away?” Maybe. But none of them start with 1 billion+ existing professional profiles, and none of them are the platform where the verification claims already live. LinkedIn isn’t entering this market from zero - it’s the only player who could build this without first convincing anyone to create a profile.
Where this goes if LinkedIn doesn’t build it
I don’t think this idea is complicated because the technology is hard. Certifications, employment records, patents, and research are all things that already exist in verifiable form somewhere. The hard part has only ever been who’s willing to do the unglamorous work of connecting them to a real person’s profile, and who has enough existing trust and reach to make that connection matter.
LinkedIn is the only company positioned to do this without asking a single professional to sign up for a new platform first. That’s not a small advantage - it’s the entire advantage. If LinkedIn doesn’t build this, someone eventually will, and they’ll spend years just trying to get people to create yet another profile before they can even start solving the actual problem.
I pitched this once, inside a hackathon, and once, directly to the people who could build it. Neither went anywhere. I still think it’s right. And the pieces required to build it - digitized government records, existing credentialing infrastructure, a workforce more independent than it’s ever been — are more in place today than they were the last time I said any of this out loud.
Somebody’s going to build the trust layer the professional world doesn’t currently have. I’d just rather it were the platform that already has everyone’s career sitting on it.
🧠 Human driven, AI assisted. The perspectives shared in this newsletter are my own, refined and structured with the help of Large Language Models.