How employment verification works
What ClearHire asks a former employer to confirm, what it does not ask, and what appears on your record afterwards.
- Last reviewed
- Length
- About 6 minutes
- Scope
- Maintained, not published. Corrections welcome.
Employment verification is ClearHire asking a company you say you worked for to confirm three facts from its own records: the company, the job title, and the dates. It is optional, it is one request at a time, and the company needs no ClearHire account — they answer from a link in an email. What the confirmation asserts is deliberately narrow, and clause 05 of the terms is the exact wording: it is not a reference, not a background check, not an identity check, and not a statement about why the employment ended. An unverified role still sits on your profile and still goes on a resume; it simply has no countersignature beside it.
Where it applies.
Asking a former employer to confirm a role
Pick the roles that matter to what you are applying for rather than every role you have held. The company receives a request naming exactly what is being confirmed, and answers yes, corrects a detail, or declines with a reason.
Answering one as the company
You do not need an account and you are not signing up to anything. You are asked to check the claim against your own employment records and confirm, correct or decline — never for an opinion, a rating or a reason the employment ended. Your name, your role and the date are recorded with the answer and shown on the record, and that is stated before you answer rather than after.
When nobody answers
A company has seven days. If nobody answers, the record is marked EXPIRED — unconfirmed, never declined and never false. Most requests that fail reach an inbox belonging to somebody who left. You can send it again, which starts a fresh seven days, and every attempt stays on the record rather than the first one being quietly forgotten.
When the answer is no
A declined record is private: you, the company and ClearHire. It never appears on a public profile, is never shown to an employer, and is never counted against you anywhere in the product. Most declines are a disagreement about a date rather than a denial that you worked there — payroll often holds a start date HR does not.
How it works.
Choose the roles worth confirming
The ones that carry the claim you are making. Verifying everything you have ever done is work for you and for four companies, and it does not make the relevant role more confirmed.
Send the request to a person who can check
Someone with access to the company's employment records. It must be an address on the company's own domain. A personal address cannot countersign employment, and a request that reaches nobody expires exactly like one that is ignored.
Seven days run, and then the request expires
Not fails — expires, and the record says unconfirmed. That distinction is deliberate: silence is not an answer, so it is not recorded as one.
Send it again if you want to
A fresh request means a fresh seven days. Every attempt is kept, because a record that hid its earlier attempts would be telling a partial story about itself.
Dispute it if the company got it wrong
A person reads a dispute and replies. We will not change a company's answer without asking them, and we will never remove their record of what they confirmed — a confirmation that could be withdrawn without trace would be worth nothing to anybody reading it.
Worked illustrations.
Constructed to show the shape of the decision, not reported cases. The figures are illustrative.
Three roles, two answers and a silence
Two companies confirm inside the week. The third never answers, so that record is marked expired — unconfirmed rather than rejected — and the role still appears on the profile without a countersignature. Nothing about the silence is shown to anyone or counted against the person.
A date the company records differently
The company corrects the start month rather than declining, because correcting is one of the three answers the form offers. The record shows the company's dates and who corrected them.
Questions people bring here.
- What exactly does ClearHire ask my former employer?
- Three facts from their own records: the company, the job title, and the dates. Nothing else. It does not ask about performance, reason for leaving, salary, eligibility for rehire, or anything a reference would cover — and the request itself says so, so the person answering can see the scope before they reply.
- Does my former employer need a ClearHire account?
- No. They answer from the link in the request, in a browser, without signing up for anything. Requiring an account would mean the request depended on somebody at a company you no longer work for choosing to register, which is the point at which most verification systems quietly stop working.
- What happens if nobody answers?
- After seven days the request expires as unconfirmed, and that is a different state from refused. Nothing appears on your record claiming the role was disputed, because silence is not a denial — companies restructure, people leave, and inboxes are full. You can send a fresh request afterwards and each attempt starts its own seven days.
- Can I re-send a request that expired?
- Yes, as many times as you like, and every attempt is kept. Re-sending starts a fresh seven-day window rather than extending the old one, and the history of attempts stays on the record — which matters, because "asked four times over a year" is itself information about how hard you tried.
- What if the company says no?
- A decline is recorded privately and does not appear on your public record as a mark against you. It also does not confirm the role, so the entry stays unverified. A company can decline for reasons that have nothing to do with you — many have a policy of confirming nothing, and some no longer hold records that far back.
- Can an employer add something I did not ask them to?
- No. The answer is constrained to confirming, correcting or declining the three facts in the request. There is no free-text field for a former employer to attach an opinion, because a verification that could carry one would be a reference with fewer safeguards — and nobody would ever send the first request.
- Is verification required to use ClearHire?
- No. It is optional, per role, and an unverified history is a completely normal thing to have — most of the product works without it. Verification is there for when a confirmed fact is worth more to you than an asserted one, which is usually at the point somebody is deciding between you and someone else.
Small things that help.
- Seven days, and then it expires as unconfirmed. Never as declined, and never as false.
- A decline is private to you, the company and us. It is not published anywhere, in any form.
- A confirmed record proves the company, the title and the dates — and who confirmed it, in what role, on what date. It proves nothing else, and clause 05 of the terms says so in more words.
- The company answering sees only the role they are confirming: not your other roles, not your applications, not your profile.
- Send requests before you need them. A company routing an unfamiliar request internally is slower than a person answering one.
- If the company no longer exists, the role stays unconfirmed. That is a limit of the product rather than a problem with you, and most people have several.
Written to be corrected. If something here is wrong, say so and it changes.