Moonlight Report (Copernicus)
In high school, I worked at a stereotypical California frozen yogurt shop. In the position, I fulfilled a number of tasks ranging from mopping the floors and maintaining the equipment to serving customers and resolving employee disputes. I loved that job and through hard work, was promoted to a shift lead before eventually leaving for college.
It wasn’t apparent to me at the time, but despite the importance of the skills attained at that job, the position would not persist on my digital resume for fear that it would obfuscate the other attributes which market me towards a specific field. In the 6 seconds[1] someone spends reading my resume, I wouldn’t want them to see Taylor Soft Serve Machine Maintainer instead of Scope definition for multiple FDA regulated products.
I don’t have the privilege to selectively provide those bullets to different individuals and professional content discovery platforms haven’t reached a level of maturity for me to present my master profile and allow effective skimming. In the digital world, our tools still only represent a single view of a multifaceted individual because we’ve been trained to believe that we have an omniscient view into someone’s identity.
What if I also wanted to be appealing as an engineer for the Taylor Company? Working with their machines as a customer would be a great addition to my resume…but that’s a sacrifice I have to make. Sorry recruiters.
In the conventional hiring process, this isn’t an issue. I would simply modify my resume to fit the position when applying based on the limited information on the requisition. In our research, this is an assumed process when applying for new positions.
For Copernicus, this is one of the issues we will be resolving. How can an individual maintain a professional network which has a scoped view into their professional experience which is dependent on the relationship? Maybe I want to maintain separate statistics and engineering profiles, selectively using them to network as a way to focus the experience. This solution also empowers recruiters and also enables a simplified application process through conventional processes.
Now lets talk about Identity and Reputation. As the white-collar workforce increasingly globalizes and productivity tools improve, remote hiring practices will continue to grow in popularity. With the global, digital talent pool, we find a few risks.
The internet has provided us with amazing social tools as well as a simple method for generating new digital identities. It is leveraged for a myriad of uses from legally binding organizational needs to cyber-bullying because of how easy they are to create.
The selective anonymity and lack of verification of these identities further add to the dynamic. Entities are free to build profiles which emulate others to exploit their reputations, making it impossible to conduct blind hiring without a formalized vetting process which verifies the individual. As a platform, the Copernicus release is actually designed to streamline the generation of these new profiles.
So how do we control profile integrity?
Moonlight maintains two user layers: accounts and profiles. Entities maintain an individual account and have the ability to generate many derived profiles from this seed. Against the account, we introduce the concept of identity anchors which are verification providers for the contents stored on the account. For example, if I bind a supported KYC anchor on my account, every one of my derived profiles will have the ability to verify that the profile is actually maintained by the claiming individual. This also applies to skillsets.
As we move into Kepler, Moonlight itself will act as an anchor for professional reputation data. This mechanism will behave in a similar manner, by providing a means of verification for work history and professional relationships which are selectively displayed on the entity’s profile to improve the confidence of people managers when evaluating candidates for all scopes from long-term hire to freelancers.
We will be sharing more sneak peaks of what we’ve been working on at the NEO DevCon that we can’t talk about just yet. Our team has been making great progress on all fronts and we are are very excited about things to come!
Thank you for being with us on this journey.
Until next time,
Tyler
