More than 3.4 billion people are employed across the world¹, a significant contribution to the global economy.

As the international workforce has continued to grow, businesses have struggled to find qualified candidates. Fraud in the hiring process has slowed down hiring as companies look to protect themselves from incorrect claims that lead to increased risks, with more than 85% of employers reporting that they have found a lie or misrepresentation on a resume or job application².

Furthermore, the continued growth of the diploma mill industry has further exacerbated the problem, with more than 3,300 unrecognised universities issuing over 50,000 Ph.Ds every year, more than are legitimately earned in the same period.

“It is a matter of recruiters and employers being vigilant. My research found worldwide, close to 30 percent of senior executives have presented qualifications they did not hold” — Dr George Brown, Academic Director of Think Education Group.

Unfortunately, given both privacy and jurisdictional concerns, there are no solutions at present for global data exchange and verification of credentials. While some universities have moved forward to provide their students with web-based verification portals, many continue to process verification requests manually, and nearly all work history and identity verification tasks must still be handled through background check services.

To better understand the scope of this problem, our team looked for employment data to explain how often background checks are performed. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics ran a longitudinal survey over 30 years and found employees held an average of 11.7 jobs in that period³.

Extrapolating this data out over the number of global employees, without factoring in population growth that is more than 40 billion job changes in the next 30 years, a significant burden on background checks and a grave risk to employers that need to be addressed.

Blockchain technology offers a promising solution to both the privacy and jurisdictional concerns associated with credential verification while allowing for operations on a global scale.

Global Problems need Global Solutions

Global problems need global solutions. Aversafe is a solution to this problem, offering a decentralized, self-sovereign credential verification service for employees, employers and educational institutions around the world.

Our team, formed of industry veterans with experience across the HR, technology and blockchain landscapes has spent years looking at solutions addressing trust in the hiring process, finding nothing that could solve the issue on a global scale.

Our approach delivers a self-sovereign identity application through which global citizens can make claims and request attestations from certificate authorities, employers and peers. Coupled with our issuer portal for organisations to manage and deliver attestations as well as our innovative certificate matching algorithms, we believe we have simplified and streamlined the method while bringing trust and transparency to the process of background verifications.