How verified employment works

A resume is a document you wrote about yourself. A verified employment record is a document somebody else agreed to. The whole of ClearHire's verification feature is the machinery for getting from the first to the second, and it is smaller than people expect.

What a countersignature is

You claim a role: employer, job title, start date, end date, employment basis. Nothing is published at that point — a claim on its own is still just a claim. ClearHire then asks the company you named to confirm it. If someone with a verified account at that company agrees, the claim becomes a countersigned record and gets a permanent public identifier such as CH-2026-0417.

That identifier never changes. A recruiter can look it up without an account and see the employer, the period and the countersigned state — which is the point. A badge that only renders inside our own product would be worth very little.

What the company is actually asked

Three questions, and deliberately no more:

1. That the person worked there.
2. The start date, and the end date if the role has ended. Dates are confirmed to the month.
3. Whether probation was completed.

We never ask for a reference, a rating, a rehire recommendation, or an opinion about performance. That is a product decision with a reason behind it: the moment a confirmation carries a judgement, answering it becomes a legal risk assessment and companies stop answering at all. Asking only for facts the company already holds in its own records is what makes the request cheap enough to say yes to.

A countersignature is a fact about a confirmation, not a judgement of quality. It records that a named company agreed a period of employment — and nothing more.

Either side can start it

Verification runs in both directions, and the clock is different depending on who opened it:

Both sides see the same record and the same countdown. There is no version of this where one party can see something the other cannot.

Silence is not a no

This is the part most verification products get wrong. When a deadline passes with no answer, the request expires. It is not marked as declined, and it is not marked as suspicious. Nobody said no; nobody said anything — which is a completely ordinary outcome when the manager who would have confirmed it left the company four years ago.

An expired request can be sent again, and it can be sent to a different verified contact at the same company.

What a decline does, and does not, do

A company can decline, and the decline is recorded with whatever reason they give. Two guards sit around that:

• Nothing about a decline is published on your public profile. A declined claim reverts to being an unverified line on a resume, which is exactly what it was before you asked.
• You can dispute it. A dispute does not overwrite the company's answer — both statements stay on the record, which is the only honest way to handle two parties who disagree about a date.

A confirmation cannot be silently withdrawn either. A company that changes its mind opens a dispute; it cannot delete a countersignature and leave no trace. A confirmation that could vanish without a record would be worth nothing to the person relying on it.

What the badge does not mean

Being precise about the limits is what makes the signal usable:

Identity verification is a different mechanism with its own states, and a verified employment record does not imply one. Conflating them would let a verified job at a real company stand in for a verified person, which is precisely the substitution a fraudster wants.

The states you will actually see

The record moves through a small, visible set. Every one of them is a state you can be shown and act on — there is no hidden intermediate that leaves you guessing: