"Verified" has become one of the more abused words on the internet. It can mean anything from "we sent them a code on email" to "we ran a full background check." So when we use it on Dealt, we owe everyone — candidates and hiring teams — a precise definition.
The four things we verify
1. Identity
That you are who you say you are. Confirmed via at least one of: government-issued ID, work email matching the employer you're claiming, or active session-bound auth on a major identity provider. We never display ID documents back to companies. They see the result of the check, not the raw evidence.
2. Employment
That the jobs on your profile actually happened. For UK candidates, this is checked against HMRC records via your consent. For international candidates and where HMRC isn't applicable, we use a combination of work-email verification, payroll integrations where available, and structured peer confirmation.
What we confirm: that the role existed, that you held it, and over what dates.
What we don't confirm or expose: salary, performance, reasons for leaving.
3. Skills
That the technical skills you claim are evidenced somewhere a screener could check. The strongest forms are: linked code repositories with your contributions over time, deployed projects, and validated certifications pulled from the issuing provider.
"Verified" here means there is external evidence of this skill, not we have personally graded you on this skill. We do not run skill exams; we surface evidence that already exists.
4. References
That the person providing a reference for you actually worked with you. Confirmed via overlapping verified employment at the same company, plus auth checks on the reference's identity. References with no verified relationship to you do not count.
What "verified" does not mean
Important enough to break out:
- It is not a quality judgement. Verified employment doesn't mean you were great in the role. It means you were in the role.
- It is not a credit check. We do not run financial background checks unless explicitly requested by a hiring team for compliance reasons, and even then only with your consent and disclosure.
- It is not permanent. Verifications expire. Skills go stale. References age. The signal degrades over time, and we represent that explicitly in the product.
- It is not invasive. We deliberately verify the minimum necessary — existence and tenure — not the entire content of someone's working life.
How verification appears to companies
A hiring team looking at a verified application sees a structured report:
- Identity: confirmed (method noted).
- Employment timeline: which roles are payroll-verified vs. peer-verified vs. unverified.
- Skills: which are evidenced and how.
- References: which are from confirmed colleagues vs. unconfirmed connections.
It's a transparency layer, not a black box. The company can see how something is verified, not just that it is. That keeps the bar honest.
Why we cap the claim
We could go further. We could add psychometric tests, code challenges, and a dozen other things — and we'd be able to use the word "verified" in twice as many places. We deliberately don't, because every additional check is friction on the candidate side and increasingly noisy signal on the company side.
The right amount of verification is the smallest amount that makes the next conversation honest. That's what Dealt aims at, and what "verified" here means.
— The Dealt team