Looking for the next revolution in employment? It’s already here

In this age of plethora of information and digital tools, building systems that are self-verifiable and that can validate credentials seamlessly have never been more critical.

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4 min readApr 17, 2019

Say there are two individuals, let’s call them tom and jerry. Tom is an employer looking to hire bright & experienced candidates for a role, while Jerry is a potential candidate with the same stuff that recruiters like Tom are looking for. Let’s take a look at some of the problems they have to face before getting what they each want after being shortlisted by one another.

For a startup entrepreneur like Tom, with limited resources, it is vital that he finds the right fit for his company. So to get more options, he goes online and registers himself on a career networking website. These websites do a pretty good job of helping employers and candidates to get visibility of each other, for the most part. But, essentially, that’s all they really do. Since anyone with internet access could potentially see Tom’s job posting, Tom would get bombarded with responses.

Let’s say Tom manages to shortlists a candidate; he’s still going to do a lot more work before he picks one. How does he know that all the information on the candidate’s profile is legit? Because his resources are limited, he’s not going to risk picking someone just due to their pretty profile. What he has to do is manually request confirmation of credentials from valid sources verifying qualifications, recommendation letters, background checks, and placement information — super time consuming and old-school. In spite of all the work, his efforts might be in vain. The fact is, it is just not that difficult for forge documents to make them look credible. If Tom was looking for an experienced manager, he could potentially end up with a photoshop expert instead.

What about Jerry? He is a highly qualified individual with the certifications and work experience to back it. Candidates like jerry should have no problems finding a job (assuming there are no shortages of jobs). However, for some reason, his profile seems to get lost in the huge pile applications and isn’t gaining the traction he thought he should have. To increase his chances, he too registers himself on multiple career networking websites. This process is time-consuming and lacks continuity.

For example, he would manually have to create an account and fill all the required information for all the websites he’s registered with. Suppose he already has an existing account which was used to get his previous job, he would now have to update all the information on the profile accordingly. Some websites even require copies of certifications and work experience to be scanned and uploaded to the career networking websites, which opens up questions regarding the privacy of the candidate and security of his data. In all probability, Jerry’s data would be stored on a cloud-based storage system, which is already proven to be vulnerable to hacks, and centralized in nature, i.e., remains in the control of the career networking platform, essentially having no control over his own data.

Well, it’s not like there isn’t a solution to the problems mentioned above. As the importance of automated processes and need for increased data security & transparency has risen, people have begun exploring technologies, like Blockchain.

Blockchain can be leveraged to create a framework to allow anybody in academia or industry to validate any information mentioned on a profile with full credibility at the lowest cost possible. It could be a blockchain-based academic registry that could be accessed by students, administrators, college admissions offices, employers, and other relevant parties, each with their own access levels and desired functionality.

In such a network, you would have an auditable, immutable record of specific academic achievements, athletic standings, attendance records, extracurricular details, and professional records. Verification of a candidate’s record would be a matter of one or two pings of the network, and due to the design of blockchains, this information would be difficult to falsify or subvert.

Using blockchain to create a digital identity can eliminate the need for intermediaries, unlocking valuable funds earlier displaced through traditional third-party verification processes.

If platforms like LinkedIn continue to exist, its main value will come from creating better user interfaces that make blockchain technology more comfortable to navigate whereas the profile information and related data would all be pulled from the blockchain.

This is a post in our on Medium blog, ‘Blockchain for Everyone’ — Human Resources Series. Sign up here to discuss any use cases. Thanks to Rohit Taneja for reflections and feedback.

Helping you understand the fundamentals of blockchain and develop elegant blockchain solutions to empower your successful businesses into new technology spaces, BirthVenue.

Sabarish Nair

Blockchain Analyst

Looking for the next revolution in employment? It’s already here

In this age of plethora of information and digital tools, building systems that are self-verifiable and that can validate credentials seamlessly have never been more critical.

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Written by Sabarish Nair