Partnership: Enhancing BloomID with Employment Attestations through SpringRole

Bloom fundamentally shifts the dynamic of information provisioning. Rather than allowing a credit bureau or third party to capture and sell your personal information, Bloom puts the control of that information directly in the hands of the user. Attestors can securely testify to the veracity of the data.

These kinds of attestations have uses well beyond credit.

Employment data, for example, plays a critical role in the job application process. Verifying a candidate’s work history is one of the most vital background checks an employer can run. This represents one of the most frequent places where an applicant may declare incorrect or false information.

HireRight reported that there there was a 27% discrepancy rate in what employees declared versus reality in the United States. That’s more than 1 out of 4 employees.

The Value of Employment Attestations

While doing employee verifications of work history offer a number of compliance and HR benefits, the process to do this today is extremely cumbersome. Traditional employment verification takes considerable human resources and doing so can be a time consuming administrative burden.

Credit bureaus happily boast that this information can be provided “in as little as 1–3 business days”. Most requesters and employers, however, find this timing unsatisfactory.

The process is also extremely messy. If the data is not present in an employment database, the verification steps often involve HR departments manually calling the past employers, who may or may not participate in the verification process.

Making the situation worse is reusability. These verifications are not reusable. If a job applicant applies to ten different companies, it’s entirely possible that each company will need to independently pay for their own verification service, wasting valuable time and resources. Or an employer may get ten different calls from separate companies to verify a past employee.

As past employers have little incentive to participate in helping their past employees, they may stop completing verifications.

The experience of waiting on these verifications create bottlenecks that kills productivity, slows the diligence process and introduce uncertainty into the hiring process.

About SpringRole

SpringRole is a decentralized protocol for attestations of professional profiles.

The goal of SpringRole is to become the first professional reputation network to be built on the blockchain, eliminating fraud from user profiles and improving transparency.

When a user signs up and adds details to his profile, the information goes through a one-time verification, and the attestation is written on the blockchain. This implies that the information entered on the profile is not susceptible to fraud and leads to a highly authentic profile. It also negates the need for new employers to spend time, money and effort in re-verifying profiles of potential candidates.

The skills that are added by the user are also endorsed by people in the user’s network. Skill endorsements are weighted according to the skill level of the endorser and need to be accepted by the sender and receiver before they are made permanent. These endorsements have a small cost associated with them, making endorsements more meaningful. This crowdsourcing of skill reputation of the user leads to an objective way to access someone’s skill proficiency. Through smart contracts, endorsers are rewarded when people they’ve endorsed get hired or paid on SpringRole.

Bloom + SpringRole: The Power of Decentralized Attestations

Bloom is a decentralized protocol.

While some of the data that users may request to import into their BloomID may come from traditional data providers, decentralized attestations offer a number of benefits.

According to Kartik, CEO SpringRole, decentralized attestations eliminate the need for trust. Centralized authorities will no longer have the power to have a walled garden approach to information. This will ensure a shift in control from centralized authorities to the rightful owner. Once the attestation is done, the owner decides who gets access and when and is no longer at the mercy of traditional institutions.

SpringRole data will be included into BloomID’s as part of our BloomIQ protocol.

This means lenders, employers, and applications built on top of the Bloom Protocol will be able to access SpringRole attestations tied to a users BloomID.

“We’re really excited to include SpringRole’s attestations as part of BloomID. Our mission is to collect critical user data and give our users control over that information. Employment verifications are a critical part of the ecosystem and further expand the uses and robust design of Bloom” added Shannon Wu of Bloom.